Re: customize messing up .emacs symlink?

["D. D. Brierton" <darren@dzr-web.com>]

On Tue, 02 Mar 2004 10:09:07 -0500, Ed L Cashin wrote:

> They are (with formatting addeded) ...
> 
>   GNU Emacs 21.2.1
>   (i386-debian-linux-gnu, X toolkit, Xaw3d scroll bars) 
>   of 2002-\03-22 on raven, modified by Debian
> 
> and
> 
>   GNU Emacs 21.2.1
>   (i386-debian-linux-gnu, X toolkit, Xaw3d scroll bars) 
>   of 2002-03-22 on raven, modified by Debian
> 
> Maybe it's some add-on that is on one machine and not the other.  I
> ought to do a little more digging and create a bug report.  

Ahhh. I'd misunderstood you. I thought you meant that you were running two
different emacsen on the same box, but rather the problem seems to be with
two identical emacsen on different boxes.

> To me it seems wrong for the default behavior of customize to be like
> this, replacing a symlinked .emacs file with a modified regular file.

Yes, I'd agree, although I suppose it depends on what the symlink is to --
is it something very exotic, like a pointer via a virtual-file-system
directly into your version constrol repository? (Perhaps that's not
possible. Perhaps it is possible and not at all exotic.)

> Does anyone know if this feature has been discussed to death already,
> or would it be good to submit a bug report?

I haven't seen it mentioned before, and I lurk here a lot, and regular
browse the web archive of the developers' list.

>> But assuming its Xemacs vs.
>> Emacs, put at the end of your .emacs something like (excuse my probably
>> crappy and very-unlisp-like lisp):
>>
>> (if (string-match "XEmacs" emacs-version)
>>     (load "~/.xemacs.customize.el")
>>   (load "~/.emacs.customize.el"))
> 
> Looks like a good solution for me.
> 
>> Each separate customize file will need to have a customization for
>> custom-file in it:
>>
>> (custom-set-variables
>>   ;; custom-set-variables was added by Custom -- don't edit or cut/paste it!
>>   ;; Your init file should contain only one such instance.
>>   [...]
>>   '(custom-file "<thisfilename>")
>>   [...]
> 
> I think it's mildly offensive that the comment says "don't edit this".

Yes -- I deliberately left that part in! :-)

>> Presumably you don't want to keep your customizations in CVS, or do you?
> 
> I'm using svn, the successor to cvs.  It's great.
> 
> To be honest, I have always tried to avoid customize entirely, since I
> can get far with an apropos search, reading docs, and putting some
> lisp in .emacs.  So I don't know whether I'd want different
> customizations on different machines.  I already set things up
> differently in .emacs based on host name.

But I though you said in your original post that it was customize which
was causing the problem. I don't know of anything else which attempts to
write stuff directly into your .emacs, although I don't use GNUS.

Best, Darren

-- 
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D. D. Brierton            darren@dzr-web.com           www.dzr-web.com
       Trying is the first step towards failure (Homer Simpson)
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