Re: Updating from Emacs 23.3.1 to 25.3

[Winston]

"Doug Harter" <address@hidden> writes:
> I am looking for some help with Upgrading Emacs. My current version is
> GNU Emacs 23.3.1. EMacs is now up to 25.3 and has a different
> directory structure. my .emacs has over 100 lines and doesn't run on
> 25.3 and I have one of my utilities which has been completely
> rewritten on 25.3 and won't run on 23.3.1.

If your new Emacs will start without your ~/.emacs, you could insert the
contents of .emacs into *scratch* and execute it statement by statement
until something fails.

Is your .emacs mostly code you wrote, or is it all
(custom-set-variables, (custom-set-faces, and the like generated by
Emacs itself as a result of settings changes and such?  If it's entirely
Emacs generated and now prevents Emacs from running, that's probably
worth a bug report.

As to changes that prevent Emacs from even starting, I vaguely recall
that
        (rplaca (assq 27 universal-argument-map) ....

had that effect, because Emacs 24.4 no longer had a binding for ESC/27
there, but my memory could be wrong.  Key and keymap changes you made
yourself directly in .emacs are probably a good place to look, though.

HTH,
 -WBE