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. 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. And the files that get created under /etc/emacs/ site-start.el and site-start.d/ Yet another site-lisp sort of area. Giving a total of (5) site-lisp kind of directories 4 actual and 1 symlink. Probably good reasons for all this, I'm just curious what they are?