Support for VMS was removed in Emacs 23. It was announced to info-gnu-emacs.
Allegedly, Emacs 21 builds are available from the “Freeware CD”.
An Emacs cheat sheet for VMS EVE users is at:
I’m currently porting GNU Emacs 21.2 to OpenVMS? 7.3-1, and summarizing progress in this space. When the work is done, only build tips will remain. --ttn
- Current status
- Rather than make everyone wait while I puzzle out the copyright status of old VMS-specific files, I’ve decided to expose the work-in-progress so others can play, too. Details are available on the Emacs for VMS homepage:
- What works (that is, reproducibly w/o too much manual tweaking)
- Configuration, “dump”, file read/write, byte compilation, timers and unixoid select(2) emulation, multiple subprocesses (synch and asynch – implies dired, comint, compile, and so forth), colors on console, filename completion (with “magic” right square brace and slash keybindings), network operations via open-network-stream. Yes, that means M-x zone in color over ssh from a VMS box. “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” (HST)
- Release methodology
- The “public releases” will actually be in the form of checking things into the GNU CVS repositories, updating the Emacs for VMS page, and making the occasional announcement to gnu-emacs-sources.
- Commentary
- Feel free to ignore the lunatic ramblings in this section.
- (2004-04-02) In debugging next-error (for M-x compile), I notice that var compilation-error-regexp-alist for Emacs 19.28 used to support specification of a function to do further parsing, beyond that which func compilation-parse-errors would do. Dropping this support makes for a cleaner design, evidently. Parsing must be one of the least-loved branches of computer science.
- (2004-05-01) I asked the GNU Autoconf maintainers for vms-branch write privs but the response was not encouraging, so I’ve decided to publish “Autoconf for VMS” independently until a time (if any) when merging maintenance efforts becomes desirable.
- (2005-03-22) There is a Bourne shell script PREP-ZIP available in the distribution directory that can be used to perform the first half of the bootstrap relatively painlessly (on unixoid hosts). Observant readers will notice a workaround for a methodology bug in the script.
- (2008-07-24) There is a discussion on emacs-devel that suggests maintenance of the port will not be resurrected.
Field Reports
Since there is no mailing list, this section is for those intrepid spirits wishing to share experiences and tips building Emacs for VMS.
- Autoconf for VMS requires GNU m4, and has been tested with Richard Levitte’s port of GNU m4 version 1.2. Newer versions may or may not work. There is now a directory “m4” w/ source and an Alpha binary in the Autoconf for VMS distribution dir.
CategoryBuilding