Re: Debian's idiosyncratic complexification of Emacs [Was: Emacs vista build failures]

[Don Armstrong]

On Mon, 14 Jul 2008, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> Those ~2 hours of my life are permanently lost, they're gone for
> ever, I'll never get them back again.

Perhaps I'm being elitist, but it took me all of 5 minutes to look up
the documentation for this, and rework through how this all was done.
 
> However, if that had been his intention, surely he would have done
> what he actually did, just with a dose of malice thrown in.

And no, it's not me.

>  Tell me, why is it considered helpful to include a content-free
> site-start.el?

We don't include a content-free site-start.el; here is its content:

;; Emacsen independent startup file.  All of the various installed
;; flavors of emacs (emacs 19, emacs 20, xemacs) will load this file
;; at startup.  Make sure any code you put here is emacs flavor
;; independent.

;; Package maintainers: do not have Debian packages edit this file.
;; See the policy manual for the proper way to handle Emacs package
;; initialization code.

> The only thing this does is to prevent the loading of the
> site-start.el in the standard Emacs place, i.e.
> /usr/local/share/emacs/site-lisp/ (This is documented on page "Init
> File" of the Emacs manual.)

Configuration files such as site-start.el need to be in /etc by FHS,
and by Debian policy.

> I do not see the purpose of this extra layer of complexity that
> Debian has wrapped around (X)Emacs.

The purpose is to make it possible for packages to work on specific
versions of emacs, all versions of emacs, for users to modify the
files and have their changes automatically respected, and to allow for
add-on packages to be easily installed and automatically configured to
work site-wide without the need for users to modify their own .emacs
files or do anything else to deal with it.

There may be better implementations of that complexity, but the
features that it gives are necessary, and frankly aren't something
that upstreams spend much time contemplating.


Don Armstrong

-- 
<Clint> why the hell does kernel-source-2.6.3 depend on xfree86-common?
<infinity> It... Doesn't?
<Clint> good point

http://www.donarmstrong.com              http://rzlab.ucr.edu