Emacs for VMS?

[Selden Ball]

Has anyone successfully built Emacs v21.2-3 under VMS?

The archive on the Freeware v7 CD seems to be missing some command files.

Thanks for whatever help you can provide.

[Hoff]

Full emacs doesn't build that well based on what I have repeatedly heard from folks that have gone after that task, and you're far from the first to run into issues with the port. (There are various sites discussing some of the tasks.)

Consider microemacs.

[Andy Bustamante]

If you're willing to spring for a third party product, www.lugaru.com, makes a Epsilon like editor available. Free trial download, I use it in ftp mode for prolonged editing sessions.

Andy Bustamante

[Edward Miller_1 · Accepted solution]

I built Emacs v21.2-3 on VMS using Freeware v8 (not v7, according to my notes). This was on a VMS 8.3 system. The build produced a usable Emacs, and I was not aware of anything of significance missing. I did find some of the instructions for doing the build lacking in clarity (and could supply more specifics on that, if need be). Note that I never tried doing a build with any older version of the Freeware.

Ed Miller, SLAC NAL.

[EdgarZamora_1]

I've gotten EMACS to build recently. It took a lot of debugging snd trial and error but finally found the right combo. I am out of the office probably until Monday next week so I can't look at my notes but I documented everything. I will post a reply next week.

[EdgarZamora_1]

The (somewhat large) attachment is a log of how I built emacs v2123 on OpenVMS Alpha 8.3. If you review it carefully you'll see how I set up the configuration parameters. Hope this helps.

[Craig A Berry]

Gosh, there are a *lot* of warnings and errors in Edgar's build log, and these are likely problems that would be pointed out by any modern C compiler, not just DEC/Compaq/HP C. I would hope some of those problems have been fixed in more recent versions of emacs. But progress is not always progress, as the current version has announced that VMS support will be removed in the next version:

http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/NEWS.22.3

I'm not an emacs user, but folks who are may want to agitate for keeping what's there. On the other hand, a completely new build using GNV might be a good alternative.

[Selden Ball]

Thanks to all for your help.

The example log file provided by Edgar helped the most, although some additional problems were encountered, primarily that there were several include (.h) files missing. Most of them I copied from the included [.OLDXMENU] directory, but one of them, xio.h, I had to locate on the Web.

Another issue is that MMK actually has to be used. MMS fails with misleading error messages.

I managed to get emacs (as distributed on Freeware v8 CD #1) to work under OpenVMS 8.3 update 8 with Multinet v5.3 (just released), so I guess the include files that I used were adequate.

I was very sorry to learn that they're planning to drop support for VMS.