Re: Changing site-lisp without installing it

[Spencer Baugh <sbaugh@janestreet.com>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Spencer Baugh <sbaugh@janestreet.com>
>> Date: Wed, 02 Aug 2023 17:14:51 -0400
>> 
>> 
>> I want to start using site-lisp at my site.  But I'm not sure how to
>> hack on changed versions of the site-lisp, without installing it.
>> 
>> What would be ideal for me is this:
>> 
>> - There is a normal, installed Emacs, with a site-lisp directory.  My
>>   users run this and get the installed site-lisp directory.  All normal.
>> 
>> - I run this same Emacs binary in some way, I don't know how, to make it
>>   use a replacement site-lisp directory, instead of the installed one,
>>   so that I can hack on the site-lisp, without having to build a new
>>   Emacs or change the actual installed site-lisp directory.
>> 
>> Now that I say all this, I guess the obvious thing to do is simply pass
>> 
>> --no-site-lisp --directory my/local/changed/site-lisp
>> 
>> and then hack away.
>> 
>> But will that behave correctly?  Are there any footguns there?
>> 
>> (Does anyone actually use site-lisp?  It seems a little under-explored,
>> but I think it will be really useful at my site, so that people can
>> easily run "emacs -q" to get an emacs with only the site configuration
>> which should help with debugging their problems)
>
> I use site-lisp, if by that you mean the site-lisp directory that is
> put on load-path.

The system-wide one in /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp?  Don't you need root
to change that one?  Isn't that inconvenient?

That's the one I mean, anyway.

> I don't really understand what is it that you are trying to
> accomplish, but one aspect that might be relevant is that there are 2
> site-lisp: one is specific to the Emacs version, the other one is not
> (so is visible to all Emacs versions).

Ah, yes, that is relevant.  But I expect to compile a new Emacs binary
with a different --prefix each time I change site-lisp anyway, so each
site-lisp will be specific to an individual Emacs binary.