I believe this system has been part of Solaris since 2.5 (November 1995), if not earlier. That would make it a contemporary of Red Hat Linux (not "Enterprise") 2.0 (the first release to use RPM) and older than the Debian distribution itself.
Even when it is available from my distribution, I sometimes want to go to sources. Most of the time this will include GNU Emacs.
Nearly every distribution compiles Emacs using scroll-bars from the GTK+/GNOME widget library, which makes them behave like scroll-bars on commercial desktops (Mac, Windows, etc.) I much prefer the old-school scroll-bars that are rarely seen today except attached to an xterm window. Emacs has a configure-time option for this - to use GTK+ widgets for everything other than scroll-bars. I always compile my own copies with this configuration.
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I should also add that commercial UNIX distributions also use packages. I have personal experience with Sun/Oracle's Package Manager suite of tools for Solaris (https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E26505_01/html/E29492/ewbej.html).
I believe this system has been part of Solaris since 2.5 (November 1995), if not earlier. That would make it a contemporary of Red Hat Linux (not "Enterprise") 2.0 (the first release to use RPM) and older than the Debian distribution itself.
Even when it is available from my distribution, I sometimes want to go to sources. Most of the time this will include GNU Emacs.
Nearly every distribution compiles Emacs using scroll-bars from the GTK+/GNOME widget library, which makes them behave like scroll-bars on commercial desktops (Mac, Windows, etc.) I much prefer the old-school scroll-bars that are rarely seen today except attached to an xterm window. Emacs has a configure-time option for this - to use GTK+ widgets for everything other than scroll-bars. I always compile my own copies with this configuration.