For years I’ve run Emacs by compiling the development source tree every week or two, just for the fun of it, to stay up with what the developers are doing. Every now and then there would be some compilation problem, but almost always make maintainer-clean would reset everything and I could try again. I gained nothing from doing this except the enjoyment of being current. I didn’t follow the emacs-devel mailing list.Last week things went weird after an update and I couldn’t figure out why. It compiled, but when I ran Emacs my init file would be partially loaded and then it froze. I tried various things (that is to say, spent four fruitless hours becoming increasingly frustrated) but couldn’t figure it out. At some point Org files broke and weren’t being recognized as Org, which is a fatal problem for me. The one thing I learned is M-x desktop-clear and that I can save more than one session with desktops, which might be useful again. Screenshot of this post being written in EmacsFinally I decided the hell with, what if I run the latest stable release? That’s 30.1 right now. I tried it and it worked perfectly. I decided from now on I will stick with the latest stable release and stop making trouble for myself. But I want to do this from source code, partly for the fun of it, partly because Ubuntu 24.04 LTS doesn’t have 30.1 available, partly because I don’t want to use a Snap or Flatpak release. These instructions from Ryan Fleck were helpful and have a good Git clean-up command in them.I’ve updated Conforguration, and it now runs essentially this:cd /usr/local/src/git clone https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/emacs.gitcd emacsgit checkout -b emacs-30.1 emacs-30.1git clean -fdx./autogen.sh./configure --with-tree-sitter --with-imagemagick && make -j6You might do it differently, but this works for me. Org I will still run from the development tree.cd /usr/local/src/git clone https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/emacs/org-mode.gitcd org-modemake -jIt’s one less thing to worry about, and one less thing to fiddle with. Maybe with the time I save I’ll finally be able to get my Emacs configuration perfect …