bug#13208: 23.3; startup.el: not possible to set inhibit-startup-echo-area-message for shared .emacs.el with different user names

[Ansgar Burchardt <ansgar@debian.org>]

The function display-startup-echo-area-message in startup.el checks that
inhibit-startup-echo-area-message is set in .emacs.el to a string
literal matching the user name. This makes is impossible to set the
option in a .emacs.el shared between different machines where I have
different user names.

It also breaks setting the option together with other options in the
same setq.

The documentation claims this is intended so that "thoughtless copying
of your init file will not inhibit the message for someone
else". However one can just add a

  (defun display-startup-echo-area-message () nil)

or

  (defun display-startup-echo-area-message () (message ""))

to ~/.emacs.el. This will also work after "thoughtless copying" so the
whole code making setting this option extra hard seems to be fairly
useless.

Ansgar

In GNU Emacs 23.3.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 2.24.10)
 of 2012-09-21 on batsu, modified by Debian