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

[Glenn Morris <rgm@gnu.org>]

Robert Park wrote:

> there's still a lot of cruft that I am rebelling against. Like 800
> lines worth of distropatching just to rip out some GFDL stuff. I find
> that kind of thing quite odious and pride myself on having a packaging
> branch that has no distropatches at all ;-)

I only count 7 Debian patches to Emacs:
http://patch-tracker.debian.org/package/emacs24/24.3+1-1

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.

Of the remaining 5 patches, the rest are all small.
One is the debian-startup thing, one adds a pointer to Debian-specific
docs, one modifies the version string, one handles the fact that they
install it as "emacs24", and the last one is some flymake trivia that 
should as of just now be unnecessary.

> 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.)