Re: Ten years (personally) of WL

[Ken Gunderson <kgunders@teamcool.net>]

At Thu, 17 Apr 2014 22:25:46 -0400,
Thomas Narten wrote:
> 
> I too have become a big fan of wanderlust (and it's only been 100
> days!).
> 
> However, I think WL could have a much larger fan base if it was easier
> to install and get running. I know of 3 persons who I think I could
> get using it, but the getting started hump seems daunting, and I'm
> hesitant to have people try if it means they spend an hour on
> installation before they can even try it.
> 
> Folk here say use el-get. My experience with el-get is 1 for 4. That
> is, I used it successfully on 1 of 4 different systems I tried.
> 
> On my laptop (running a distro based off of RHEL6), it didn't work at
> all. I think the problem is I have an older version of git and the
> server hosting el-get is picky about certificates. That is already way
> more than I want to understand when installing software.
> 
> On Ubuntu, it installed pretty easily. (yeah!). And once I spent a
> little time using it, its pretty cool -- but I have not found basic
> documentation on how to use el-get once you have it running oriented
> to someone who just wants to know the steps for installing (say) WL.
> 
> On Fedora 18, I iterated through trying to run it, with each attempt
> getting a bit further. Needed git, then someone wanted cvs, then
> something needed svn, eventually something wanted "autoconf" and I
> gave up. When it fails, it can be hard to figure out what is needed.
> 
> I just tried installing el-get on a windows-8 machine running emacs-23
> (which I just unzipped and started using). It aborts with "Could not
> create connection to github.com:443" (my browser seems to connect
> OK). When installing on linux, el-get at least created a buffer trace
> that had errors in it. For my windows try, there is no log buffer
> showing anything.
> 
> Surely there is a better way of doing this? And this better way is
> documented somewhere I just haven't found yet?
> 
> PS, I'd be willing to put some cycles into documenting this, but right
> now I'm at a loss as to what to recommend...
> 
> Thomas

I guess I got really lucky.  I switched to Archlinux a couple years
back, in no small part because it offered an up to date E17.  As part
of the bargain I got a pacman managed Wanderlust install 'just works'
out of the box.  Now configuring WL was an entirely different ball of
wax, and I'd also only recently switched to Emacs.  I haven't looked
at Arch's Wanderlust package repo but might be worth taking a gander
and figuring out what they're doing right that seems to be so 'not
right' on the distro's you referenced.

Best-- Ken