Re: Emacs vista build failures

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Don Armstrong <don@donarmstrong.com> writes:

> On Mon, 14 Jul 2008, David Kastrup wrote:
>
>> I know of _no_ upstream Emacs or XEmacs developer who claims to
>> understand or get along with the Debian setup.
>
> There's no need for upstream developers to bother, since it's all
> handled for them by Debian Developers.

Uh, upstream developers need to compile and test their work, too.  And
it is not feasible to, say, arrange your own package in front of the
load-path somewhere in /usr/local/ since the Debian policy puts .el
files and .elc files in completely different directory hierarchies (and
different places in the load-path order), so things tend to get mixed up
if they are more than once in the load-path.

As one consequence, the diagnostic tool
M-x list-load-path-shadows RET
pretty much goes crazy on Debian.

The only sane way out is to compile and manage your own Emacs and
packages.  And that's what _all_ Emacs and XEmacs developers I know who
are not simultaneously Debian maintainers do.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum