GNU Emacs (Stow)

### 12.2 GNU Emacs

Although the Free Software Foundation has many enlightened practices regarding Makefiles and software installation (see see Other FSF Software), Emacs, its flagship program, doesn’t quite follow the rules. In particular, most GNU software allows you to write:

    make
    make install prefix=/usr/local/stow/package

If you try this with Emacs, then the new value for prefix in the ‘`make install`’ step will cause some files to get recompiled with the new value of prefix wired into them. In Emacs 19.23 and later,8 the way to work around this problem is:

    make
    make install-arch-dep install-arch-indep prefix=/usr/local/stow/emacs

In 19.22 and some prior versions of Emacs, the workaround was:

    make
    make do-install prefix=/usr/local/stow/emacs

#### Footnotes

##### (8)

As I write this, the current version of Emacs is 19.31.