Re: Emacs vista build failures

[Don Armstrong]

On Mon, 14 Jul 2008, David Kastrup wrote:
> Alan Mackenzie <address@hidden> writes:
> > It took me ~2 hours to get my Emacs to find my site-start.el -
> > Debian (and thus Ubuntu too) puts a content-free site-start.el
> > somewhere in /etc which blocks out your own real one.

Just edit /etc/emacs/site-start.el if you want it emacs wide, or shove
stuff into /etc/emacs<flavor>/site-start.d/; it's pretty trivial.
[Though frankly, most things that people think they should shove into
site-start.el doesn't belong there: it belongs in ~/.emacs.]

> Forget about Debian and Emacs. They use a clever system for sharing
> package code between different Emacs versions (which you can install
> at the same time) and XEmacs, so clever that nobody understands it.

Lots of us understand it; it's pretty trivial. Thanks to that system,
installing packaged emacs add-ons is absolutely trivial.

If you're lost, see
http://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/debian-emacs-policy

> I know of _no_ upstream Emacs or XEmacs developer who claims to
> understand or get along with the Debian setup.

There's no need for upstream developers to bother, since it's all
handled for them by Debian Developers.


Don Armstrong

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