> > I'm wondering... what's the big deal with emacs.  I just got 20.2,
> > did configure (with X support) and then did make.  It finished
> > compiling the same day.
> 
> Yup -- Emacs is a drop-in on just about anything.

Emacs is nice...

> > The dump core dumped, but the resulting emacs binary seems to work
> > fine.
> 
> Same here.  I use Emacs 19.34b on all my modernish systems (which all
> run NetBSD/current), and on the VAX, the 'emacs -loadup -dump' job
> crashes with a SEGV every time, leaving the executable seemingly all
> dumped, but not yet chmod'ed to be executable.  Doing a 'make install'
> as if nothing had happened results in a working installation.  Weird!

First, let's get a few things cleared here.
When Emacs dumps, what is does is that it takes a snapshot of itself, and
makes that snapshot a runnable file. This way, all the tedious setups,
loads, and other stuff is already done, so that startup goes much faster.
Without this dump, things still works just fine, but it takes *much*
longer to start.

The crash when emacs sumps is because of an error in an include file. I
don't remember which right now, but I fixed it a long time ago, to that I
do have a dumped emacs-19 here.

	Johnny

Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                  ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt@update.uu.se           ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol