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Hand-holding, Linux, and me

Reading around gopherspace today, I came across

sloum's joyful post about people using Bombadillo.

I thought it was a nice little bit of serendipity, since here I am, `C-x 3`'d up with elpher on one side and an eshell on the other, building emacs from scratch with xbps-src. This is going to be a little bit of do-it-yourself computing ethos, a little bit of a gripe about packaging in Void.

I was reading up on the Planet Emacs feed and came across this post again, from the Mastering Emacs guy:

Unicode, Ligatures and Color Emoji ~ Mickey Peterson

I like ligatures and color emoji, so I looked at his ligatures.el repo to see what I needed to install ... and it turns out the default emacs on Void Linux *doesn't* come with harfbuzz or cairo support, which are needed for ligatures. Plus, they're just good things to have, so I don't know why they're not included by default ....

Anyway, no worries, I can look at the template file for the package. Except the template has some functions, `vopt_with` and `vopt_if`, that aren't explained. And it took some real searching to find them, let me tell you. I finally did in the void-packages repo, but I really had to search.

AND* it turns out that you can't just pass some switches to xbps-install, you have to clone the whole void-packages tree from source, rebuild emacs with the options enabled, and then install that. So I'm currently doing that, but like ... it should be easier. Or maybe I just think it should be today. Now I'm writing this, I'm thinking how a lot of users might want the minimum viable, and power-users can do whatever they want. It is Void, after all, it's even more minimalistic than Arch in a lot of ways ...

And hey, I figured it out. I'm building it now. If I wanted an easy to use distro, I could've installed Debian or Ubuntu or even Arch, to have the AUR. So.

Do I want hand-holding? Or do I want customizability? I guess that's the tension I need to resolve.