🚀 go-pugleaf

>Perhaps GNU Emacs should come with a empty local lisp directory (on
>load-path (somewhere)), and an info item [might be a dumb idea:]
>* Local:    (local).         Additional Manuals Locally Installed
>
>This is so administrators could easily move their local GNU Emacs
>add-ons to a new emacs version during a emacs upgrade.

At the FSF, we have lots of other info files.  Since info is the
preferred documentation format for the GNU system, it doesn't make
sense to treat it as an Emacs facility; it's actually a general system
facility that Emacs knows how to browse nicely.

So we keep our info tree in /usr/local/lib/info, and put the following
in our site-init.el file:

    ;;; Tell emacs where we keep our info tree - separate from the Emacs
    ;;; distribution, because we keep things besides emacs info there.

    (setq Info-directory "/usr/local/lib/info/")

and when we install a new Emacs, or a new anything, we just put the
new docs in /usr/local/lib/info.


We also use a lot of non-standard elisp packages.  In Emacs 18.57, the
makefiles and initialization code conspire to make things pretty
impossible to add other directories to your dumped emacs.  You can set
your EMACSLOADPATH environment variable to a colon-separated list of
directories, or you can put something like this in default.el, which
gets loaded after the user's .emacs file:

    (setq load-path (append load-path '("/usr/local/lib/elisp")))

This adds new entries to the end so that the user's additions to the
load-path come first.

However, this won't help users who want to load things in their .emacs
files, because load-path won't get extended until after .emacs is loaded.

This is so much more annoying than it should be it just isn't funny.
I haven't thought carefully about it yet, but I promise that in Emacs
19, all will be sweetness and light.  :-)