2012年3月4日日曜日

Building emacs on a Debian Box to Explore the Source Code

I use emacs daily and have been interested in the source code.  Occasionally I write short emacs lisp code to take care of daily chores and have set up.
It's great that emacs has a built-in help system, which you can invoke by [control-h a] if you need to search some feature by words in description.  If you know a function by name, you can just type [control-h f] with the cursor at the function name while you are editing your elisp code, or you can specify a function name at the help function prompt.  In any case, if the system finds a function, the description shows up.  (Try [control-h ?] for more ways to make use of the help system...)

Also you can refer to implementations (elisp or c code) by [ESC x find-function].  To be able to view c source code, you need to set up a local source code directory, i.e. set the following variable:


find-function-C-source-directory
There are many pages that shows how to do it, but I couldn't find a description on a emacs document, so here I just say the variable and the use is defined in find-func.el:

http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/tree/lisp/emacs-lisp/find-func.el

This time, I decided to set up my own emacs environment which I can mess around with.  So I started from here, after searching for the source code repository:
http://savannah.gnu.org/bzr/?group=emacs

Following the instruction, I branched from the repository with the command:
bzr branch bzr://bzr.savannah.gnu.org/emacs/trunk

A directory named "trunk" is created and directories and files are copied from the directory.

Now it's pretty straight forward to build your own emacs.  Files like INSTALL, INSTALL.BZR, and README are well-written, so probably you wouldn't have much trouble to complete the process.

As for me, I built emacs on a Debian box, and I needed to install some libraries like libxpm, but you just need to look at the error/warning messages to figure out what needs to be done optionally.  You also need autotools if you don't have them installed yet on your system.  Later I might go into details if I have a chance and feel like to...  Once again, the process is well-documented and it shouldn't be of much trouble to try by yourself.



2012年3月2日金曜日

A Live Charity Music Event (3/3 6pm in Yushima, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo)

There'll be a live charity music event in Yushima, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo starting 6 pm on March the 3rd:

Buy a bandana as a ticket for 2000 yen, which is a pass to all the lives held at 17 bars/restanrants.  Your drinks/foods are not included.  Your ticket fee will be donated to Iwate, Miyagi, Fukushima, which are prefectures damaged in the series of earthquakes and tsunamis last year.

The restaurants, the bars, the bands have been working hard to make this event happen, for nearly free, if you think about their time and fees to prepare bandanas, equipments and stuff.  There are sponsors contributing money for the event, for the whole 2000 yen will be sent to the prefectures.

So if you buy a few drinks, you can also contribute to the bars/restaurants, and be part of it!  Just enjoy the lives and you can change Japan a bit in a positive way.  I believe it's more important than just donating money.