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

[W. Greenhouse]

Hi Robert,

Robert Park <address@hidden> writes:

> Known issues:
>
> * No support for elisp packages installed by dpkg. This issue is
> unfortunately more complicated than simply twiddling load-path and I'm
> still investigating it. However, I consider this issue quite minor
> because package.el support is *superb* in trunk and I highly recommend
> it's flexibility over the elisp packages installed by dpkg.
>
> If you want to give this a try in Ubuntu, you can run these commands:
>
> $ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-elisp/ppa
> $ sudo apt-get update
> $ sudo apt-get install emacs-snapshot
>
> (or emacs-snapshot-nox as you prefer)
>
> Currently, builds are provided daily for Ubuntu Precise, Raring, and
> Saucy (latest LTS, latest stable, and dev series). There is a Quantal
> build available in the PPA, however I stopped making new Quantal
> builds the day Raring was released ;-)
>
> So please, take it for a spin, let me know how it's all working for
> you, and let's get all bugs fixed in trunk because distropatches are
> Eeeeeeevil!
>
> Oh, and here's the recipe, for the curious:
>
> https://code.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-elisp/+recipe/emacs-daily

I'm quite new to Debian/dpkg packaging in general, and have no
familiarity with Launchpad recipes, but it sounds like your package
might not be loading all of the startup bits expected by
/usr/share/doc/emacsen-common/debian-emacs-policy.gz.  For starters,
does M-x load-library RET debian-startup RET from your Launchpad builds
actually point somewhere?  If so, does the `startup' library load it?
That `debian-startup' file is the entry-point for Emacs dpkg packages
setting up their autoloads and the like, and yes, unfortunately, this is
a big fat distropatch. :-)

Ubuntu's emacs-snapshot packaging may have changed this whole
infrastructure in some way that I'm not taking account of, but I would
expect that many elisp packages in Ubuntu are largely unchanged from
Debian and simply expect this to work.

I agree that it's a pretty minor complaint if the rest of the package is
working great, but dpkg packages for Emacs features are still useful in
spite of package.el, particularly if they have non-elisp dependencies,
e.g. the `auctex' package, or the `maildir-utils' package (containing
the `mu' maildir indexer which is the binary dependency for djcb's
`mu4e' Emacs mailclient).

HTH,

WGG

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