Re: Debian's idiosyncratic complexification of Emacs

[Stefan Monnier]

>> Incidentally, while on the issue of debian emacs startup, I have the
>> following snippet in my .emacs file for hooking my non-debian emacs
>> into the debian emacs package system:
>> 
>> ;; Debian stuff
>> (unless (boundp 'debian-emacs-flavor)
>> (load "/usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/debian-startup")
>> (debian-startup 'emacs22)
>> (debian-startup 'emacs22))
>> 
>> ["emacs22" because there is no emacs23 in debian yet]

It strikes me that Debian's Emacsen seem to not be plain enough.
I mean, Debian seems to change Emacs's startup.el even tho there's no
need for it.  Instead of changing startup.el to (load "debian-startup")
and call some magic function in it, it'd be much better to leave Emacs's
own startup code unchanged and simply provide a site-start.el that loads
debian-startup as well as /etc/emacs/site-start.el and all the rest.

I can't see why this can't work just a well as the current setup, with
the advantage of minimizing the difference between a plain Emacs and
a Debian Emacs (and clearly documenting this difference since it's kept
in a user-visible file rather than stashed in an internal source file
only available if you install the emacs-el package).


        Stefan