As regular readers know, I’m a great admirer of Org-mode; I use it everyday to, among other things, write these blog posts, maintain my todo list, manage projects, and keep several other files up to date.
I generally track the development Git repository but I haven’t updated since 7.8.03. Today I upgraded to 7.8.11 and noticed a small but very nice change. The procedure after doing a Git pull is to run make in the Org-mode directory and then do a 【Meta+x】 org-reload to load the new software. The problem is that Org’s Makefile doesn’t work with OS X because the Emacs executable is stored in a Mac specific place.
I wrote a small shell script to modify Makefile to account for this but then the next pull would fail because there was a modified Makefile in the directory. I tried to remember to delete the modified file before the pull but, of course, I seldom did. It wasn’t a big thing, just a minor annoyance.
Today when I did the pull I noticed the Makefile had changed. Now, you’re not supposed to edit the make file itself but just put your changes in local.mk. Since local.mk is strictly local it doesn’t get overridden by the pull and there’s no need to fix things up every time you update. As I said, it’s a small change but it eliminates an annoyance and makes updating just a bit more frictionless. Many thanks to the Org maintainers for making my life easier.