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Re: [Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com>] Re: Terminfo and emacs



>>"Harry" == Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com> writes:

 Harry> Attached is a typscript report of this problem.
 Harry> The `ls' commands I used didn't come thru in the typescript so I've
 Harry> gone thru and annotated what appeared in them.

	Hmmm. I note that the files removed are not emacs21
 files. Indeed, the dir /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp was removed. This
 affects all installed emacs lisp packages; since they put files in
 /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/<package>, which are suddenly removed.
 Unfortunately, just reinstalling emacs21 shall not help now.

	I note that while reinstalling, removing the add-on packages
 went over well. I think this indicates that emacs packages could be
 removed even after /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp was removed. 

	Of course, now you are installing emacs21 again. The directory
 /usr/lib/emacsen-common/packages/ was unchanged, so it attempts to
 re-byte-compile all the add-on emacs packages -- even though the .el
 files (which normally live in /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/) are no
 longer there!

	BAM!. The add-on emacs-lisp package, which has not bee
 reinstalled, expects to find its lisp files intact in the regular
 directory /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/<package>. Which no longer
 exists.  And won't until you reinstall the add-on package (cxref,
 mh-e, etc).  Reinstalling emacs21 has not replaced the files under
 /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/<package>, since they did not belong to
 the emacs21 package in the first place. They belong to, in your case,
 cxref, mh-e, sawfish, and whatever package contains noweb-mode.el.
 Until these files are replaced, any attempts to install a new version
 of emacs21 shall fail.

	I guess the moral of the story is that if integral parts of
 the infrastructure are damaged, you may need to reinstall *all*
 affected packages to recover from the damage.

	Moving /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp impacts all emacs-lisp
 packages installed on the machine, and those are the packages that
 needed to be reinstalled. (emacs21 did not need to be, if I am seeing
 this correctly).

	If this analysis is correct, there is no bug in emacs (well,
 there is nothing emacs21 packages can do to avoid this). Just don't
 go removing dirs ;-).  I generally put things in /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp,
 which takes precedence over paths in /usr/share/emacs; and let the
 files that belong to packages be (or remove the debian package, and
 use the local package only).

	I hope this helps.

	manoj
-- 
 Be consistent. Larry Wall in the perl man page
Manoj Srivastava   <srivasta@debian.org>  <http://www.debian.org/%7Esrivasta/>
1024R/C7261095 print CB D9 F4 12 68 07 E4 05  CC 2D 27 12 1D F5 E8 6E
1024D/BF24424C print 4966 F272 D093 B493 410B  924B 21BA DABB BF24 424C



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