Re: removing old installations

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

On Sat, Jun 25 2011, Peter Dyballa wrote:

> Am 25.06.2011 um 19:34 schrieb Eric Abrahamsen:
>
>> Given that no other "emacs" executables are on my system (at least, to
>> the best of my knowledge, and I spent a while rooting them out), what
>> other leftover files could be confusing my present installation?
>
>
> With locate (or find) you can find all instances of "emacs" and also
> "emacs-23.2" and "emacs-24.0.50" and remove them. The same for the
> version sub-directories "23.2" and "24.0.50" in
> /usr/local/libexec/emacs and /usr/local/share/emacs.
>
> You can launch that "emacs" binary in your PATH and choose from the
> Help menu "Send Bug Report…" or type M-x report-emacs-bug RET. In the
> *unsent mail to bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org* buffer you'll find a text
> describing where and how this "emacs" was built.
>
> Finally you can use the trace utilities to see which files and
> directories these "emacs" executable files open.

Thanks for these tips! If you have a moment I hope you'll look at this
one step further.

I'm quite sure I've removed everything emacs-related from /usr/local/*.
One odd thing is, my emacs man file is located at
/usr/share/man/man1/emacs.1.gz (symlinked from
/etc/alternatives/emacs.1.gz), but within the FILES section of that man
page, it gives all the emacs-related paths as /usr/local/*. Not sure
what that's about.

The bug report data shows that emacs was compiled by Debian. I note that
--enable-locallisppath includes, among many other paths, the two paths
that emacs complains about when it's run from the command line.

Among the voluminous output of strace is:

access("/usr/local/share/emacs/23.2/site-lisp", F_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
write(2, "Warning: Lisp directory `/usr/lo"..., 80) = 80
access("/usr/local/share/emacs/site-lisp", F_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
write(2, "Warning: Lisp directory `/usr/lo"..., 75) = 75

But the same trace is absolutely stuffed with stat64 calls to half a
million non-existent files and directories (including lots of /usr/local
stuff), so I don't know why that should merit an error. If you or anyone
else is really interested, I've put a large chunk of the trace here:

http://pastebin.com/paWFrRGh

Is my only problem that emacs was compiled with some non-existent
directories in the lisploadpath?

Thanks,
Eric