Re: Call for testing: Daily snapshot builds of Emacs for Ubuntu

[Robert Park <r@robru.ca>]

On Mon, May 13, 2013 at 7:48 PM, Glenn Morris <rgm@gnu.org> wrote:
> I only count 7 Debian patches to Emacs:
> http://patch-tracker.debian.org/package/emacs24/24.3+1-1

Well, there are 13 by the time it gets to ubuntu:

http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-branches/ubuntu/raring/emacs24/raring/files/head:/debian/patches/

> Of course it is trivial to remove some of those if you don't need to
> obide by the rules that the distribution sets (on what they consider
> acceptable free software licenses in this instance) for its packages.

Right, this is why I made an Ubuntu package instead of a debian
package. Because I don't care about the DFSG, the GFDL is "free enough
for me", and I wanted a pure trunk experience, for better testing of
what is shipped by upstream.

>> Is there any possibility of generalizing this and having it accepted
>> in upstream emacs? Obviously we wouldn't commit any debianisms into
>> emacs trunk but it seems like it might be generally useful for emacs
>> to have some kind of site-start.d directory for all distros to place
>> custom startup scripts into.
>
> AFAICS, Red Hat solved this with a trivial and sensible-looking site-start.el:
>
> ;; load ".el" files in "/usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/site-start.d/" on startup
> (mapc 'load
>       (directory-files "/usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/site-start.d" t "\\.el\\'"))
>
> I don't know what the debian-startup thing brings to the table beyond that.
> (I'd probably ask http://lists.debian.org/debian-emacsen/ if I wanted to
> know.)

Yikes, that is trivial and sensible-looking. The site-start.el
provided by emacsen-common package in debian (and ubuntu) contains
only commented lines, so is effectively blank. Now that i see there's
such a trivial solution for this, I'm definitely not adding that
distropatch to my packaging ;-)

I'll have to do some further research to find out why it was chosen to
leave site-start.el blank and see about perhaps dropping this
particular distropatch from the official debian packaging.