Building the Development Version of Emacs on OpenBSD

And now, the continuing stoooory of a quack who’s gone to the dogs, I mean, a recipe for how to build the development version of Emacs as easily as possible under yet another operating system:

This time it’s OpenBSD.

(This recipe is for OpenBSD 6.7, but it should be the same on most modern versions of OpenBSD.)

Building Emacs under GNU/Linux is totally trivial, which isn’t a surprise, since so many Emacs developers use that as their primary OS. Building under OpenBSD has some quirks.

Anyway, first, as root, install the build requirements.

pkg_add gcc git gnutls gmake jansson automake autoconf
pkg_add `pkg_info -f emacs | grep ^@depend | sed 's/^.*://'`

pkg_add will prompt you for what versions of automake/autoconf to install. Just choose the newest ones.

Then, as a non-root user, run this:

git clone https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/emacs.git
cd emacs
export AUTOCONF_VERSION=2.69
sh autogen.sh
CC=egcc ./configure --without-makeinfo
make -j4
./src/emacs

And now you should see a beautiful Emacs window on your OpenBSD monitor:

FSVO.

By the way, I wondered what the easiest way to run a bunch of VMs on Linux was these days, and I started futzing around with VMWare… which failed.

Then somebody suggested virt-manager, which was just an “apt install virt-manager” away, and that worked without any problems: I just started it, “New virtual machine” and pointed it to the .iso file of OpenBSD 6.6. Easy peasy.