seanstickle

Short note.

I decided to start using emacs as my primary editor for my programming. Since I use a Mac at home, I went ahead and installed both Aquamacs and Carbon Emacs to see which one I like better.

For both of these, I wanted to install w3m, a textual web browser. This was an enormous pain. Installing w3m from MacPorts failed — it either locked during compilation, or it would compile and then ram to 99% cpu usage when starting w3m.

So I tried Fink, which was a bit slow and not as nice as MacPorts. But w3m ran.

I didn’t want to keep Fink, since it looks a little behind the curve, so I tried to get MacPorts to compile and run correctly, using the source and patch information from Fink to help me.

I finally got it running, hurrah. I don’t know what the actual underlying problem is, but w3m depends on boehmgc. MacPorts uses version 7, and Fink uses version 6.7 So I edited the Portfile in the MacPort and changed it to use boehmgc 6.7. Ran “sudo port install boehmgc”, and that installed fine, so the 6.7 version was ok. Then ran “sudo port install w3m” and that compiled and installed fine; and it ran fine.

So, if nothing else, replacing the boehmgc version 7 with 6.7 seems to do the trick.

Sorry for the messy posting. I am a little tired after spending a couple of hours on this, and am not writing at my best.