Re: Changing site-lisp without installing it

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Spencer Baugh <sbaugh@janestreet.com>
> Date: Wed, 02 Aug 2023 17:14:51 -0400
> 
> 
> I want to start using site-lisp at my site.  But I'm not sure how to
> hack on changed versions of the site-lisp, without installing it.
> 
> What would be ideal for me is this:
> 
> - There is a normal, installed Emacs, with a site-lisp directory.  My
>   users run this and get the installed site-lisp directory.  All normal.
> 
> - I run this same Emacs binary in some way, I don't know how, to make it
>   use a replacement site-lisp directory, instead of the installed one,
>   so that I can hack on the site-lisp, without having to build a new
>   Emacs or change the actual installed site-lisp directory.
> 
> Now that I say all this, I guess the obvious thing to do is simply pass
> 
> --no-site-lisp --directory my/local/changed/site-lisp
> 
> and then hack away.
> 
> But will that behave correctly?  Are there any footguns there?
> 
> (Does anyone actually use site-lisp?  It seems a little under-explored,
> but I think it will be really useful at my site, so that people can
> easily run "emacs -q" to get an emacs with only the site configuration
> which should help with debugging their problems)

I use site-lisp, if by that you mean the site-lisp directory that is
put on load-path.

I don't really understand what is it that you are trying to
accomplish, but one aspect that might be relevant is that there are 2
site-lisp: one is specific to the Emacs version, the other one is not
(so is visible to all Emacs versions).