Re: XEmacs octave mode (font lock problem)

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On Thu, Feb 05, 2004 at 12:49:15PM +0900, Victor Munoz wrote:
> 
> 
>  Hello. Lately I've had a problem with editing octave files with
>  XEmacs. I'm using Debian woody, and this may be an issue with the 
>  distribution or with XEmacs. So I'm posting this to the octave help
>  and debian user lists, in case someone has a clue. 
>  
>  When I open a file, XEmacs loads octave mode. However, when I try
>  to edit it (for instance, I add a space in a line such as 'if fig==8,',
>  XEmacs complains:
>  
>   (warning/warning) Error caught in font-lock-pre-idle-hook': (error No such
> face font-lock-builtin-face)
> 
>   Now, searching in the Internet I found discussions about this issue, 
>   but they're very old. In fact, I got this same warning when I used
>   Debian potato. Last year I switched to woody, and I was glad to see
>   it disappear, so I understood the patch was available in the woody
>   distribution. However, now I installed a new machine, installed the same
> XEmacs/octave packages I had before, and the problem is here again!
> 
> In case it helps, I use xemacs 21 (mule version, not-gnome version), and
> the octave 2.0.16.92-7 package. Octave mode works better with emacs 21,
> but I still prefer what I used to have a few months ago with xemacs.
> 
> Any ideas? Thanks in advance,

Well, 2.0.16.92-7 is from Debian stable and therefore almost two years old.

Another bug report regarding XEmacs and the very latest octave2.1-emacsen
package was filed recently [1], and addressed with a small patch by JWE. You
could try the newer .el files from a current octave2.1-emacsen package -- as
this isn't binary code, it can't interfere with your stable system. But
you'd need to manually tweak the installation or simply overwrite the .el
files and then rebuild the .elc (see what the postinst does).

In the long run, as the 'code gap' between stable and the newer upstream
widens, it would be nice if someone started to provides backports of current
testing/unstable packages to stable -- www.backports.org would be a place to
start. 

Hth, Dirk

[1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=229336

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