Re: Questions about emacs-snapshot (and also a small patch)
Daniel Brockman <daniel@brockman.se> writes:
> I wrote:
...
> I'd probably be better if these were added a bit more automatically on
> a bit lower level; in a word, they should be hardcoded. As far as I
> can tell, they are somewhat hardcoded in the Debian emacs21 package,
> but I can't figure out why they aren't for emacs-snapshot.
>
> This might still be a problem with my system, so I'd appreciate if
> someone else could confirm/deny that `load-path' lacks these entries.
I will look into this soon.
>> What is a good way to find out why a package is failing to load?
>> The ``Error while loading 50foo'' messages are not in themselves
>> helpful. For example,
>>
>> Loading 50w3m-el (source)...
>> Error while loading 50w3m-el
>> Loading 50wget-el (source)...done
>> Loading 50whizzytex (source)...done
>> Loading 51debian-el (source)...
>> Error while loading 51debian-el
>> Loading 51planner-el (source)...
>> Error while loading 51planner-el
>>
>> How do you know what needs to be done to fix the w3m-el, debian-el,
>> and planner-el packages?
>
> It turned out that most of these problems were caused by a weird
> situation that I do not fully understand, although I know the core
> issue was byte compilation. At one point, I was completely unable to
> install emacs-snapshot.
>
> The way out was to remove the troublemaking Emacs applications one by
> one until emacs-snapshot could install cleanly, and then reinstall the
> applications with emacs-snapshot in place. This gave them a chance to
> byte-compile themselves for emacs-snapshot.
>
> God, I'm not sure why I'm writing this. Hopefully the vague shreds of
> information can be of value to someone.
It comes from a buggy emacsen-common which has been recently fixed:
emacsen-common (1.4.16) unstable; urgency=high
* Fix sarge RC bug. Alter debian-pkg-add-load-path-item to handle nil
in load-path. Thanks to Manoj Srivastava. (closes: 270388)
at least, last time I saw such messages for a long time until emacsen-common
was fixed.
Anyway, here is what needs to be kept in mind:
- packages do not explicitely support emacs-snapshot. They need to
explicitely be added the emacsen-snapshot flavor in their install script
- emacs-snapshot is not an emacs21 flavour
- emacs-snapshot currentlt provides emacs 22.0.50 and its Emacs Lisp
is not fully compatible with Emacs 21 so packages that have not been
ported to it yet will potentially break
> Anyway, I'm learning a lot from this. I'm now a *huge* step closer to
> a healthy, Debian-integrated, bleeding-edge Emacs! In fact, I think
> all the pieces may just have fallen into place, because so far this
> installation is *smooth*. Thanks again Jérôme and everyone else who
> helped make this happen! :-)
You're welcome.
--
Jérôme Marant
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