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bloemelau

Member

Registered: 2016-02-27

Posts: 3

[SOLVED] Getting spacemacs. Is it worth it?

I would like to use spacemacs again. This requires emacs version 24, while the current version is 25. So I go to the ALA and install the latest 24 version for my system.
On starting emacs the following appears:

emacs: error while loading shared libraries: libncursesw.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

So I figure I need a previous version of ncurses as well, but a lot of packages depend on ncurses that latest version.
I got the thought of installing the previous version of ncurses alongside the newest one.
My question is: is it worth it to try and install packages myself? I've never done anything like this before and I am worried to break things (especially since packages like bash are dependent on ncurses).

My course of action would be:

1. Looking at the current ncurses PKGBUILD and changing up the version and package name so I can install it alongside.

2. Trying to build emacs 24 from scratch using this aur package . This currently fails with a segmentation fault.

3. Trying to change the previous package's PKGBUILD to include the previous version of ncurses as in step 1

Would that be enough? The ncurses dependency in emacs is through 7 other packages (pactree emacs | grep ncurses | wc -l), so do I need to downgrade all of these as well? (as well as bash, readline, mesa, wayland)?

Thanks in advance!
bloemelau

Last edited by bloemelau (2016-09-25 00:06:09)

WorMzy

Forum Moderator

From: Scotland

Registered: 2010-06-16

Posts: 11,865

Website

Re: [SOLVED] Getting spacemacs. Is it worth it?

So I figure I need a previous version of ncurses as well, but a lot of packages depend on ncurses that latest version.

I highly recommend that you don't go down this rabbit hole any further. Downgrading packages is not a long-term solution, and generally isn't a great temporary work-around either. On top of this, downgrading select packages is not supported here.

I see there is spacemacs-git on the AUR which doesn't have a versioned dependency on emacs v24, have you tried this? If you do require emacs v24, then you should install it from the AUR as you have attempted, but using a fully-up-to-date system, not one with some packages out-of-date. If you still get segfaults, post the full output, we may be able to help.

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bloemelau

Member

Registered: 2016-02-27

Posts: 3

Re: [SOLVED] Getting spacemacs. Is it worth it?

Hi WorMzy.
Thanks for the quick reply. I'll take your advice to heart!

As I thought, the spacemacs-git doesn't do anything else than the normal way of installing it. (Spacemacs is actually just a configuration file for emacs, including directives for emacs itself for what packages to install. The problem using version 25 is that the last step of installing doesn't work as of yet, thus requiring 24.)

The output of makepkg can be found here.

Thanks again
bloemelau

alive4ever

Member

Registered: 2016-07-10

Posts: 65

Re: [SOLVED] Getting spacemacs. Is it worth it?

If you just need libncursesw.so.5 file, you can obtain the file from aur package ncurses-5-compat-libs. No need to mess up with system default packaged ncurses.

Scimmia

Fellow

Registered: 2012-09-01

Posts: 11,560

Re: [SOLVED] Getting spacemacs. Is it worth it?

If you need emacs 24, the best option is to build it. Forget the AUR, just grab the build files from the official repos svn/git.

Last edited by Scimmia (2016-09-24 14:38:24)

bloemelau

Member

Registered: 2016-02-27

Posts: 3

Re: [SOLVED] Getting spacemacs. Is it worth it?

Thanks for all the help guys! It turned out to be a spacemacs specific issue.

Using @alive4ever's tip I was able to get emacs 24 running, but the same problem as in emacs 25 occurred. That got me into debugging spacemacs myself and I found the issue. Everything works as before now, even in emacs 25!

For the googlers out there:
The problem:

• Spacemacs freezes on installation with the progress bar 1/3 of the way filled and saying "done" in the mini-buffer

• Restarting spacemacs after that makes it freeze with a layer loading in the minibuffer.

The plausible solution:
The installation hangs on the configuration of the the package 'exec-path-from-shell'. I guess it's trying something that needs root, since running emacs as root will solve the problem.
Of course running emacs as root all the time is a stupid idea, so just add exec-path-from-shell to the excluded packages in your .spacemacs configuration file, then `rm -rf ~/.emacs.d/{.cache,elpa} && emacs` will delete, reinstall and configure the packages.

Thanks again WorMzy, alive4ever and Scimmia for giving me this joyful feeling everyone knows after solving stuff like this!