🚀 go-pugleaf

I'm a happy epoch user, I've just built Epoch (4.2) for the first time, for
running under 386BSD, for my home machine.

I am a comparative novice at this: I've only built one or two things
before, and nothing as big as epoch.

The good news: I got it running, with very little help from my friends.

The bad news: I had some problems that I think clearer instructions
could have sorted.  Two points in particular.  

* The grounds on which I should choose between "make" and "build-install"
  were not clear to me.  In the end I went with "build-install"...

* Because I was transferring Epoch on floppy disks, I tried to minimise the
  amount of stuff I took.  In particular, I didn't bother to shift the
  ".elc" files, thinking that I could simply re-constitute them from the
  ".el"s.  This was not a straightforward exercise: I certainly could not
  simply "do Meta-x byte-compile-file repeatedly from xemacs" as it says in
  the PROBLEMS file.  Unfortunately
  it was late at night, and I don't remember the exact details now (plus I
  am off on holiday for two weeks, so don't have time to reconstruct them:
  sorry).  But several files refused to byte-compile.  Sometimes it was
  because other files were not loaded first, but in some cases it seemed to
  be the fact that the missing definition was later in the same file: it
  appeared that the file would not compile, or load, until it had already
  been loaded.  I found problems with compilations stopping because of
  missing definitions for at least the following: when, functionp, cadr
  and epoch-add-setup-hook.
  
  I got round this by a combination of measures, including loading cl.el
  before byte-compiling mini-cl.el, and evaluating the definitions of a
  number of functions (e.g. functionp) from within the files that defined
  them, even though the file itself wouldn't load.

If byte-compiling really should be dead easy, then I must have blundered at
a high level in some way, but I really don't know how.  Or is it that
nobody has actually DONE a byte-compile of all these files from scratch
lately, and a web of inter-dependencies has built up.  If the latter, then
somebody should either explain in detail what is needed, or try to build a
"script" file, complete with duplicated definitions as needed, to do it all
in a oner.

Sorry that this is not the worlds clearest bug report, but I am rushing to
get things done before I go away for a couple of weeks.

I think Epoch is pretty damn good: keep up the good work.

Robert.