Re: run/load a lisp script before user init file

[Jarek Czekalski]

W dniu 2013-10-08 08:27, Stephen J. Turnbull pisze:
> It doesn't actually solve any problems, and makes some of them harder
> to solve (eg, uninstall).

I thought it makes uninstall easier. Just erase the file you added. I 
mean that during install I add the file site-lisp/emacspeak/site-start.el.

>    It's ugly (why should the site-start
> library be treated differently from any other?[1])

I don't think of site-start as of a library. Rather as a start-up 
script. Let's go back to Debian Emacs. Why did they invent site-start.d 
directory? To circumvent the lack of the feature I describe. So let's 
call site-start a script and the problems gone :)

>    It's not general
> (I suspect that at the point where site-start is run, the load-path is
> very short.)

No. On Debian it already contains dozens of paths.

> What's wrong with the obvious solution?  Like this:
>
> 1. Install your script on the load-path in some application-specific file.
> 2. Compile it.
> 3. Find site-start.  If it doesn't exist yet, create an empty one.

Easy to say: "Find site-start". How? Let's have a difficult example: 
Debian. It places site-start.el file in /etc/emacs. It is a template, 
empty file with comments. When I inspect the load-path at site-start 
moment, the beginning of load-path is as follows: /etc/emacs23 
/etc/emacs. So which place should I choose for *my* site-start? And what 
if the next dev chooses /etc/emacs23, because he would somehow know how 
to locate this better place.

> 4. Check for the presence of "(require 'my-script-file)" in
>     site-start.  If it's there, you're done.  (This can be done
>     accurately by using the Lisp reader to read site-start.)
> 5. If it's not there, append it to site-start.

The solution you suggest is not bad. I'll fallback to it :)

Jarek