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

[Robert Park <r@robru.ca>]

On Sat, May 11, 2013 at 7:23 PM, W. Greenhouse <wgreenhouse@riseup.net> wrote:
> it sounds like your package
> might not be loading all of the startup bits expected by
> /usr/share/doc/emacsen-common/debian-emacs-policy.gz.

Right now, it's not doing anything ;-)

I did spend a little bit of time trying to apply this distropatch:

http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-branches/ubuntu/saucy/emacs24/saucy/view/head:/debian/patches/0002-Run-debian-startup-and-set-debian-emacs-flavor.patch

But it didn't seem to be enough to work on it's own... there's some
other magic piece of the puzzle that I haven't discovered yet (some of
the other distropatches are quite mysterious to me and may interact
with this in ways that weren't obvious upon an initial skim).

Just tried enabling it again locally, and this is what I get in my
*Messages* buffer at startup:

Loading /etc/emacs/site-start.d/00debian-vars.el (source)...done
Loading /etc/emacs/site-start.d/50autoconf.el (source)...
Error while loading 50autoconf: No /usr/local/ prefixed paths in load-path
Loading /etc/emacs/site-start.d/50cmake-data.el (source)...done
Loading /etc/emacs/site-start.d/50dictionaries-common.el (source)...
Error while loading 50dictionaries-common: No /usr/local/ prefixed
paths in load-path
Loading /etc/emacs/site-start.d/50gtk-doc-tools.el (source)...done
Loading /etc/emacs/site-start.d/50lbdb.el (source)...done
Loading /etc/emacs/site-start.d/50pylint.el (source)...
Loading /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/pylint/pylint.el (source)...done
Loading /etc/emacs/site-start.d/50pylint.el (source)...done
Loading /etc/emacs/site-start.d/50python-docutils.el (source)...done
Loading /etc/emacs/site-start.d/50python-guppy.el (source)...done
Loading /etc/emacs/site-start.d/50yaml-mode.el (source)...
Error while loading 50yaml-mode: No /usr/local/ prefixed paths in load-path
For information about GNU Emacs and the GNU system, type <f1> C-a.
Type "q" in help window to restore its previous buffer, C-M-v to scroll help.

Not sure if that's meaningful to you.

>  For starters,
> does M-x load-library RET debian-startup RET from your Launchpad builds
> actually point somewhere?

Well, I just typed in those commands and they worked...

>  If so, does the `startup' library load it?

No, because I don't currently have the above distropatch applied.

> That `debian-startup' file is the entry-point for Emacs dpkg packages
> setting up their autoloads and the like, and yes, unfortunately, this is
> a big fat distropatch. :-)

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. I'd be willing to put a bit of effort
into this if there was some indication from upstream that it had a
chance of being accepted (ie, what are the acceptance criteria?).

> Ubuntu's emacs-snapshot packaging may have changed this whole
> infrastructure in some way that I'm not taking account of, but I would
> expect that many elisp packages in Ubuntu are largely unchanged from
> Debian and simply expect this to work.

I haven't checked closely, but yes, I expect that all the elisp debs
are imported unmodified; Emacs is not exactly a strategic package that
is subject to lots of scrutiny/modifications by Ubuntu ;-)

(most of the ubuntu distropatches that I am aware of are simply
bugfixes backported from trunk anyway).

> I agree that it's a pretty minor complaint if the rest of the package is
> working great, but dpkg packages for Emacs features are still useful in
> spite of package.el, particularly if they have non-elisp dependencies,
> e.g. the `auctex' package, or the `maildir-utils' package (containing
> the `mu' maildir indexer which is the binary dependency for djcb's
> `mu4e' Emacs mailclient).

Oh yeah, it's definitely something that's on my radar to be fixed
generally, just that I don't use any of those things you mentioned so
everything is working great for me ;-)