Peter S Galbraith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > What we need is an alternate directory that is _not_ under /etc > where we could also put Emacs startup files.
This already exists. What we need is _not_ to mess with what Emacs does by default, as I've said before in other contexts without luck. > That would be the subject of a bew bug report. :-) I was about to make one, and just came checking in the bug archives... Check back later for a solution if you're interested, when I've had time to submit it. Hear, hear on the substance of the report. I filed bugs a while back about packages that rendered various things inoperable in Emacs when they were removed and was referred to the policy document, which puzzles me considerably. I was told to to use `dpkg --purge' rather than `apt-get remove', which seems quite unhelpful. (I'd already done that, but only after doing non-trivial debugging to figure out the highly obscure error from Emacs stuff that I've actually maintained.) The basic problem seems to be that Debian fights the mechanisms in Emacs that should allow exactly what Debian is trying to do, as far as I can tell.
