Re: Emacs vista build failures

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> writes:

> Hi, Lennart!
>
>> I wonder if this still is the case with Ubuntu?
>
> I tried Ubuntu.  It's an arrogant and patronising distribution - they
> try to pretend that there's no such thing as the root user, and they
> try to stop you finding out.  They have their own idiosyncratic init
> program with a fragmented, undocumented configuration system.  The
> response of my request for this documentation was "hey, why don't
> _you_ contribute it?".
>
> Still, if you can cope with that sort of attitude, Ubuntu seems to
> work relatively well.  However, it was business as usual (2 - 6 hours
> per issue) when I got to installing framebuffer on my Ubuntu.  It took
> me ~2 hours to get my Emacs to find my site-start.el - Debian (and
> thus Ubuntu too) puts a content-free site-start.el somewhere in /etc
> which blocks out your own real one.  I keep meaning to complain about
> this.

Forget about Debian and Emacs.  They use a clever system for sharing
package code between different Emacs versions (which you can install at
the same time) and XEmacs, so clever that nobody understands it.  Not
even Emacs or XEmacs itself (just try M-x list-load-path-shadows RET and
shudder).  Just compile and configure your own Emacs from scratch.

I know of _no_ upstream Emacs or XEmacs developer who claims to
understand or get along with the Debian setup.

> Yes.  I think a bigger problem is that each distribution tries to
> "encapsulate" the problem in its own way, but they end up just
> wrapping the problem in yet one more layer of undocumented complexity.
> Sometimes I think it would be better if the instructions just said
> "fill in these configuration files as follows, using your favourite
> text editor" rather than obfuscating the process with layers of
> scripts and GUI "friendliness".

There are situations, but they get pretty rare.  Nowadays I rarely need
to resort to "look away now and don't ask what I did" when configuring
the computer of somebody else.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum