Re: opening makefile with error message.

[Maciej Katafiasz <mathrick@gmail.com>]

Den Wed, 09 May 2007 09:44:05 -0700 skrev bpatton:

> Fontifying region...(error No match 2 in highlight (2 font-lock-
> variable-name-face))
> 
> I have a makefile that I originally created with gvim.  I've since
> switched to GNU emacs.
> I kept getting the error above, so I commented out every line in the
> file.  Thinking I could uncomment a few lines at a time to find the
> problem.
> First line brought the problem
> include makefile.definitions
> 
> I don't understand the error message

It seems that some part of font-lock is requesting the second submatch (in
a regex, ie. the match for the second parenthesised part), which wasn't
found. Hard to say why exactly that is, might be that some regex there is
malformed, or maybe someone forgot to catch errors somewhere. The best
starting point is to make a minimal file that triggers that, then turn on
debugger on error, and see where exactly it dies and figure out why.
Reading elisp manual to see how exactly font-lock does its thing will
probably help, I myself never needed that, so I have no idea.

Cheers,
Maciej

PS. That's kinda obvious, but you really want to have source (ie. the .el
files, not just compiled .elc) before you start poking at it, otherwise
any debugging is kinda pointless and impossible. This is important if you
use a distro-packaged emacs, since they split out source .el into a
separate package.