Hi,
The current version of emacs in Alma 9.5 is a pretty old 27.2. Is there a way of getting a newer version without resorting to compiling from scratch? I’ve already got epel installed.
Thanks!
The emacs is not an “essential” package, so replacing it (with another RPM) should not break anything. Maybe.
Naturally, if you do use third-party package, then updating it is up to you.
Only RPM’s should be allowed to put files into system directories.
Fedora 41 seems to have emacs-29.4. One could take its src.rpm, install mock from EPEL, and use mock to rebuild emacs-29.4 RPM packages from the source package for Alma. Occasionally the newer packages do have requires that take you into rabbit hole, so beware.
The plan B is naturally to build and install from sources (not as root, so not to /usr/local, but perhaps to ~/.local for yourself).
Plan C (if previous fail), is to get Spack https://spack.io/ from github and use it to install emacs. (There you can learn about environment modules too.)