Re: customize messing up .emacs symlink?

[Ed L Cashin]

"D. D. Brierton" <darren@dzr-web.com> writes:

> On Mon, 01 Mar 2004 21:00:51 -0500, Ed L Cashin wrote:
>
>> Hi.  I have a .emacs file under version control and symlinked into my
>> home directory.  Every once in a while, emacs replaces my symlink and
>> creates a regular file.
>> 
>> Just now I sent some usenet news and saw a message flash by:
>> 
>>   Wrote /home/ecashin/.emacs
>>   Sending news via news.gmane.org using nntp...
>>   Opening nnimap server on 127.0.0.1...
>> 
>> The difference between the old .emacs and the impostor is shown
>> below.  It leads me to suspect that the customize code of the two
>> emacs versions I use are competing.  
>
> Put your (two) customizations in (two) separate filesto .emacs. I don't
> know which two versions of emacs you use. 

They are (with formatting addeded) ...

  GNU Emacs 21.2.1
  (i386-debian-linux-gnu, X toolkit, Xaw3d scroll bars) 
  of 2002-\03-22 on raven, modified by Debian

and

  GNU Emacs 21.2.1
  (i386-debian-linux-gnu, X toolkit, Xaw3d scroll bars) 
  of 2002-03-22 on raven, modified by Debian

Maybe it's some add-on that is on one machine and not the other.  I
ought to do a little more digging and create a bug report.  

To me it seems wrong for the default behavior of customize to be like
this, replacing a symlinked .emacs file with a modified regular file.
Does anyone know if this feature has been discussed to death already,
or would it be good to submit a bug report?

> But assuming its Xemacs vs.
> Emacs, put at the end of your .emacs something like (excuse my probably
> crappy and very-unlisp-like lisp):
>
> (if (string-match "XEmacs" emacs-version)
>     (load "~/.xemacs.customize.el")
>   (load "~/.emacs.customize.el"))

Looks like a good solution for me.

> Each separate customize file will need to have a customization for
> custom-file in it:
>
> (custom-set-variables
>   ;; custom-set-variables was added by Custom -- don't edit or cut/paste it!
>   ;; Your init file should contain only one such instance.
>   [...]
>   '(custom-file "<thisfilename>")
>   [...]

I think it's mildly offensive that the comment says "don't edit this".

> Presumably you don't want to keep your customizations in CVS, or do you?

I'm using svn, the successor to cvs.  It's great.

To be honest, I have always tried to avoid customize entirely, since I
can get far with an apropos search, reading docs, and putting some
lisp in .emacs.  So I don't know whether I'd want different
customizations on different machines.  I already set things up
differently in .emacs based on host name.

-- 
--Ed L Cashin     PGP public key: http://noserose.net/e/pgp/