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[Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com>] emacs21



[Forwarded from debian-users on advice of posters there]

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A fairly long-time emacs user, I'm accustomed to using a site-start.el
file as a place to do general things. In my single user system it can be
quite a lot since no one else is stuck with it.

Having installed the emac21 package, it seems my site-start.el file from
other installs elsewhere, is not recognized as an init file and is not
loaded even though it is in the `path' and its directory
/usr/share/emacs/site-lisp shows up in 

       C-h v load-path <RET>

However changing its name to default.el causes it to be read as an init
file.  I don't see this behavior on several other installations of 
emacs-21 (from source) on other machines.  

I know default.el has long been a name that emacs recognizes as init but
so has site-start.el, far as I know.

I wondered if this change is something to do with my installation or if
it is something debian has setup.

Also curious about the the way files get installed with emacs21 and
emacsen-common  packages.

I see it sets up /usr/share/emacs  with subs of site-lisp and emacs-21
when the emacs source package default is /usr/local/share/emacs/
<subs>.

Sort of a normal thing for a distribution to do. Leaving the
/usr/local area for source builds and development type stuff.

However:
It also creates the ones under /usr/local but they are empty.  Why both?

Seems like, if the official deb emacs21 is going to use /usr/share then
it would leave /usr/local/share for possible source built emacs for
developement or what ever.  That would provide a handy way to keep them
separate and head off cluttered path type problems.

And the files that get created under /etc/emacs/ site-start.el and
site-start.d/

Yet another site-lisp sort of area. Giving a total of (5) site-lisp
kind of directories 4 actual and 1 symlink. 

And the files under /etc/emacs/site-start.d/:
00debian-vars.el  50cflow.el  50cxref.el  50gettext.el  50mh-e.el  50nowebm.el
What are those about?  I don't read lisp well enough to just browse
thru them and see what they do.

Most of them have no comments section. One that does is 50cflow.el
 but then it turns out to be a sort of greek to me.  
/etc/emacs/site-start.d/50cflow.el  might be an example... hehe.

Probably good reasons for all this, I'm just curious what they are?


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