I often have development systems where I need my favorite editor: Emacs Live. Since Emacs Live requires Emacs 24.4+, and as of writing the latest version in the standard yum repositories is 24.3, rather than fish around for a potentially dangerous RPM, I strongly prefer to build from source.
Most of my remote development hosts do not typically have a build chain installed, so to set one up:
sudo yum group install "Development Tools"
Download and extract the intended Emacs sources, e.g.:
wget http://mirror.clarkson.edu/gnu/emacs/emacs-25.3.tar.gz
tar xvf emacs-25.3.tar.gz
Configure the build:
cd emacs-25.3
./configure
# use --with-x=no with configure to exclude the X11 UI from the build, which is ideal for text-only remote systems
# use --with-x=no with configure to exclude the X11 UI from the build, which is ideal for text-only remote systems
I often, however, run into the following:
...
configure: error: The required function 'tputs' was not found in any library.
The following libraries were tried (in order):
libtinfo, libncurses, libterminfo, libtermcap, libcurses
Please try installing whichever of these libraries is most appropriate
for your system, together with its header files.
For example, a libncurses-dev(el) or similar package.
Which can be fixed by installing ncurses:
sudo yum install ncurses-devel
Retry the configure step:
./configure --with-x=no
And proceed to build:
make
sudo make install
Finally, launch (with high color terminal):
export TERM=xterm-256color && emacs
