default.el and version control

[drain]

I'd like to do one of two things, though answers to both would be useful:

(1) For Emacs to load default.el (containing basic configs), if one of my
inits fails after an experiment, i.e., when one of them produces this
message:

"Warning (initialization): An error occurred while loading
`/home/john/.emacs':"

My .emacs contains eight load commands referring to eight files collected
into one directory, .emacs.d/mylisp.

But I want default.el to be ignored otherwise. Now I've scoured the web and
I still don't understand what directory default.el must be in for the
following command to work (which I added to one of the .el inits my .emacs
is instructed to load):

'(inhibit-default-init t) 

I tried copying default.el to usr/share/emacs23/site-lisp, I added that
address to the .emacs load-path list, didn't work. default.el was not
inhibited.

I'd like the .emacs to run default.el if one of the normal inits (eight of
them collected into a directory) fail to initialize. I want to avoid
bouncing back to vanilla Emacs settings every time an init mistake is made.
In my wl-init.el this isn't a big deal, but miscellany.el and keybindings.el
contain stuff pertaining to basic functionality.

Right now I'll manually load default.el with M-x load-file under these
conditions.

(2) Even better than relying on default.el, I'd like .emacs to load version
controlled backups of these eight init files, going farther and farther back
until loading without error. They are already rerouted to a dedicated
.emacs.d/cache/backups directory with this code:

(setq make-backup-files t ;; do make backups
  backup-by-copying t ;; and copy them here
  backup-directory-alist '(("." . "~/.emacs.d/cache/backups"))
  version-control t
  kept-new-versions 2
  kept-old-versions 5
  delete-old-versions t)



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