By now you all probably know that Emacs 24.3 is out. This is a substantial release with lots of new goodies. I could write a long blog post about them but fortunately Mickey has has already done the work so I can be lazy.
As usual there was no problem compiling and installing Emacs. For OS X it’s just
./configure --with-ns make install cp -R nextstep/Emacs.app /Applications
If you’re on a different platform, just follow the directions in the INSTALL file.
This time I did have configuration problems. The first thing that happened was that Emacs couldn’t activate org2blog during initialization because it couldn’t find org. Of course, org was there but it wasn’t being managed by ELPA so I set it to be loaded by ELPA. That didn’t bother me because I’d been meaning to move the rest of my packages over to ELPA anyway. After that, everything loaded without problem. I started happily writing this post but when I went to insert the above link to Mickey, I got an error complaining that org-no-popups was not a valid function. After a little investigation I discovered that the Org folks are recommending against loading org with ELPA because of this error—they claim it’s a problem with ELPA. Now I was back to org2blog not loading. I moved that out of ELPA too and everything starting working fine.
I’d rather have everything in ELPA but I can live with the current situation. At least everything is working again. The takeaway is that if you’re an Org user (and are loading the latest version rather than the builtin) you may want to move it out of ELPA.
Once I got past the initialization problems, everything ran fine. As I said, this is a substantial release so it’s worth getting it installed as soon as you can find the time.