Re: need help with cryptic error message

[Lowell Gilbert <lgusenet@be-well.ilk.org>]

kj <socyl@987jk.com.invalid> writes:

> I have Emacs 22.1, and I'm trying to turn on whitespace-mode.
> Nothing I have tried works so far.  It would take a very lengthy
> post for me to describe everything I've tried, so I'll just say
> that the latest I've done is to put the following in my .emacs
> file:
>
>   (autoload 'whitespace-mode "whitespace" "Toggle whitespace visualization." t)
>
> ...per the documentation in http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/WhiteSpace.

That page appears to document a different whitespace.el than the one
that comes in emacs 22.

> When I re-start emacs, visit some file, and try the command
>
>   M-x whitespace-mode
>
> ...I get the error message
>
>   Autoloading failed to define function whitespace-mode
>
> ...which is almost completely useless.  How can I get more information
> on why this defintion failed?

It failed to find any function by that name.  Indeed, there isn't one in
the version of whitespace.el that you're using.

> (FWIW, emacs won't let me try the command "whitespace" by itself.
> If I attempt it, Emacs simply adds a hyphen to the "whitespace" I
> had typed in the minibuffer, and waits for some completion from
> me, e.g.  "mode".)

Right.  It has already autoloaded those commands.

> The file whitespace.elc is perfectly accessible in
> /usr/share/emacs/22.1/lisp/whitespace.elc.  How can I read the
> documentation (and, in particular, the version number) in this file?

In most installations it will have come with the source code, in the
form of a whitespace.el (or maybe compressed into whitespace.el.gz or
some such) in the same directory.

> Any other words of wisdom would be much appreciated.

Nothing unobvious; you need to either get the other whitespace.el and
install it in place of the one you have, or figure out how to use the
one you have (which is documented in the top of its elisp file).