Re: [comp.emacs] .emacs blues on firing up Xemacs 21.4.4

APA> Hi Michael, do you want to answer this :-) It's a bug, it's fixed. AM> I built and fired up Xemacs 21.4.4 for the first time AM> yesterday. I'm somewhat unhappy about what's happened to my AM> ~/.emacs (GNU Emacs 21.1 vintage). Yes. We're very sorry about that. The only hope you have is that if you have an running GNU Emacs with the customizations in it, saving customizations will probably do the right thing. AM> Mind if I ask a couple of questions? 1/ Did Xemacs 21.4.4 AM> leave a backup of my .emacs anywhere, and if so, where? No, it did not. It should, but doesn't. Note that this kind of thing can happen anyway, because of the way Customize works. The migration policy just makes it an accident waiting to happen. I think "migration" is actually a pretty accurate description of what happens. Nothing (assuming .emacs loads successfully) is changed; the contents of .emacs are simply moved into two new files, .xemacs/init.el and .xemacs/custom.el (which once done is a lot safer than having a single .emacs which Emacs edits behind your back). AM> 2/ Did the program actually remove my existing customisation AM> settings from my .emacs, or was that my own fumbling? XEmacs did. What happens is that Custom _never_ backs up your customizations, it just overwrites them. If there is an error in .emacs _before_ your customizations, then your customizations do not get loaded into (X)Emacs. If you then save your (nonexistent) in-core customizations, Custom happily wipes out the existing saved customizations. The migration policy makes this far more likely for two reasons. (1) The new version of (X)Emacs may introduce changes that cause errors in .emacs. (2) It automatically saves customizations (something a user is unlikely to do if .emacs is broken). -- Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN My nostalgia for Icon makes me forget about any of the bad things. I don't have much nostalgia for Perl, so its faults I remember. Scott Gilbert c.l.py