Re: best gnu/linux distro for emacs

[Alan Mackenzie]

Jay Belanger <jay.p.belanger@gmail.com> wrote:

>>> For now, what is the "best" distribution of GNU/Linux for running emacs?

> ...

>> Debian is known for relatively strict adherence to the philosophies of
>> free software.  But in Debian, Emacs documentation is in package
>> `emacs24-common-non-dfsg`, since the Debian community and the FSF have
>> some disagreement.  There are many packages about Emacs in Debian, like
>> `emacs-goodies-el', `emacs-snapshot' and `debian-el'.  And there are
>> also many Debian related Emacs libraries, like devscripts-el[3],
>> apt-mode[4], apt-sources[5] and so on.

> I recall there were some complaints that Debian had some odd Emacs
> setup; I don't recall the details, but I seem to recall David Kastrup
> pointing them out.  Does anybody remember?

They put a dummy site-start.el under /etc somewhere.  This can catch you
out if you have your real site-start.el in a normal Emacs place such as
/usr/local/share/emacs/site-lisp/site-start.el since the dummy one gets
loaded instead of the real one.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).