On 03-Mar-2002 Harry Putnam wrote: > A fairly long-time emacs user, I'm accustomed to using a site-start.el > file as a place to do general things. In my single user system it can be > quite a lot since no one else is stuck with it. > > Having installed the emac21 package, it seems my site-start.el file from > other installs elsewhere, is not recognized as an init file and is not > loaded eventhough it is in the `path' and its directory > /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp shows up in > > C-h v load-path <RET> > > However changing its name to default.el causes it to be read as an init > file. I don't see this behavior on several other installations of > emacs-21 (from source) on other machines. > > I know default.el has long been a name that emacs recognizes as init but > so has site-start.el, far as I know. > I wondered if this change is something to do with my installation or if > it is something debian has setup. >
can't help here, sorry. > Also curious about the the way files get installed with emacs21 and > emacsen-common packages. > > I see it sets up /usr/share/emacs with subs of site-lisp and emacs-21 > when the default is /usr/local/share/emacs/ <subs>. > > It also creates the ones under /usr/local but they are empty. Why both? > > Seems like, if the official deb emacs21 is going to use /usr/share then > it would leave /usr/local/share for possible source built emacs for > developement or what ever. That would provide a handy way to keep the > separate and head off cluttered path type problems. > /usr/local is where non packaged things are supposed to live. If you did not get it from a Debian package, we do not expect to see it anywhere else but /usr/local (outside of home dirs of course). Debian packages create the /usr/local dirs so the user has a place to put things and ensures the packages know how to read from the /usr/local dirs. Perl, python, tcl, all do this as well.
