I'd like to find the easiest way to install Emacs 29 (the latest) on Debian Jessie.
Is it possible? Reasonably easy? Is there one package I can download or will I be in dependency hell?
I'd prefer not to have to compile.
--
rhk

No entity has permission to use this email to train an AI.


--- PyGate Linux v1.5.11
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Thu, Feb 19, 2026 at 14:08:38 -0500, rhkramer@gmail.com wrote:

I'd like to find the easiest way to install Emacs 29 (the latest) on Debian Jessie.

First of all, 29 is not the latest version of emacs. 30 is.

Second of all, jessie is *so* far past end of life that it's ridiculous. According to the Debian "jessie" Release web page, "Debian 8 has been superseded by Debian 9 (stretch). Regular security support updates have
been discontinued as of June 17th, 2018."

That's nearly 8 years ago.

Trying to install the latest version of something on such an old operating system is just begging for problems.

Your most sensible course of action would be to install Debian trixie
which comes with emacs 30. Since your current release is 5 versions
out of date, I wouldn't even recommend an upgrade. I'd just reinstall.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.11
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Thu, Feb 19, 2026 at 02:08:38PM -0500, rhkramer@gmail.com wrote:

I'd like to find the easiest way to install Emacs 29 (the latest) on Debian Jessie.

Ouch. End of life mid-2018. BTW: latest (production) Emacs is 30.2, not 29. First 29 (29.1) was released Jul 2023, long before Jessie's EOL. Yes, there
is an LTS and an ELTS, but I doubt anyone is dedicated to backport new
software to that. That said...

Is it possible? Reasonably easy? Is there one package I can download or will
I be in dependency hell?

I'd prefer not to have to compile.

...compiling Emacs is pretty straightforward, and it doesn't have outrageous dependencies. If I were you, I'd try that (actually, I'm running on an
Emacs 31).
Cheers
--
t


--- PyGate Linux v1.5.11
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Thu, Feb 19, 2026 at 08:27:39PM +0100, tomas wrote:

On Thu, Feb 19, 2026 at 02:08:38PM -0500, rhkramer@gmail.com wrote:

I'd like to find the easiest way to install Emacs 29 (the latest) on Debian
Jessie.

Don't take my "ouch" as meaning "you should be running a newer Debian"
(you'll hear that around here a couple of times, I tend to assume that
you're grown up and have whatever reasons, so I just shut up. That was
more: it'll be difficult to find a working binary package for your case). Forgot some useful links:
https://www.debian.org/releases/
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/
Cheers
--
t


--- PyGate Linux v1.5.11
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Thu, 19 Feb 2026, rhkramer@gmail.com wrote:

I'd like to find the easiest way to install Emacs 29 (the latest) on Debian Jessie.

Is it possible? Reasonably easy? Is there one package I can download or will
I be in dependency hell?

I'd prefer not to have to compile.

As others have said, Jessie is very old.

Having said that, I still do some work on Jessie (I do some testing on
potato too), but almost all of it is in a chroot rather than a booted
system and I bind mount so that I can use a modern editor on a modern
OS editing the files that the jessie chroot sees.

Where I absolutely need to use a booted system and an original kernel
then I just make do with whatever was present in jessie - but for the
most part you can make do with a modern kernel and there's little need
to boot.

Tim.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.11
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

I'd like to find the easiest way to install Emacs 29 (the latest) on
Debian Jessie.

That's a weird mix of versions. To each his own, I guess.

Is it possible? Reasonably easy? Is there one package I can download
or will I be in dependency hell?

In theory it should be easy to compile Emacs-29 on such an old
OS, but I can't guarantee that it will work without having to tweak
a few things.

I'd prefer not to have to compile.

Ah! Hmm... it seems highly unlikely to me that there's a pre-existing
Debian package for Emacs-29 which can run on Debian jessie without
having to upgrade many of jessie's packages to newer versions (at which
point it won't look very much like jessie any more, I suspect).


=== Stefan

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.11
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Thursday, February 19, 2026 03:50:04 PM Stefan Monnier wrote:

I'd like to find the easiest way to install Emacs 29 (the latest) on

Ah! Hmm... it seems highly unlikely to me that there's a pre-existing
Debian package for Emacs-29 which can run on Debian jessie without
having to upgrade many of jessie's packages to newer versions (at which
point it won't look very much like jessie any more, I suspect).

Ok, thanks, I might give compiling a try (for version 30).
--
rhk
| Sorry about the sig -- some people think it is too long -- it is my soapbox.


--- PyGate Linux v1.5.11
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Hi RHK-and-all: Here in Debian SID I have version 30.2, what I would really want to do if there are ways of pointing Speakup at an Emacs DecTalk server without actually running Emacs, which I really don't understand. I notice when Debian wants to upgrade Emacs, it sometimes takes more than 20minutes, while stalling on a message similar to "compiling byte7" Eventually it will complete.
Thanks in advance
Chime

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.11
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

Hi,

On Thu, Feb 19, 2026 at 02:08:38PM -0500, rhkramer@gmail.com wrote:

I'd like to find the easiest way to install Emacs 29 (the latest) on Debian Jessie.

Is it possible? Reasonably easy? Is there one package I can download or will
I be in dependency hell?

Emacs is available as a flatpak but flatpak itself didn't ship with
Debian until Debian 10.

Possibly you could do it by creating a chroot and installing modern
Debian and emacs into it, e.g. with debootstrap.

Thanks,
Andy

--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.11
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)

On Thu, Feb 19, 2026 at 5:13?PM <rhkramer@gmail.com> wrote:

I'd like to find the easiest way to install Emacs 29 (the latest) on
Debian Jessie.

Is it possible? Reasonably easy? Is there one package I can download or
will I be in dependency hell?

Probably dependency hell.

I'd prefer not to have to compile.

Building from sources is not too difficult. See, for example, < https://superuser.com/a/1028960>.
Jeff


--- PyGate Linux v1.5.11
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)