Integrating Emacs built from source into Debian

https://rrthomas@github.com/rrthomas/src-emacs-on-debian

Maintainer: Reuben Thomas rrt@sc3d.org
Author: Michael Olson mwolson@members.fsf.org

N.B.: If you use this package, you should purge it before upgrading your distribution, because otherwise it is likely to break the upgrade process: the emacs binary may well depend on library versions that are removed by the upgrade, and hence the emacsen-common hooks will fail!

This git repository contains some useful resources for integrating Emacs built from source into Debian or derivatives like Ubuntu.

There are two parts to this kit:

1. You should run debian-init.el early in your Emacs startup process (I load it immediately after setting up load-path). It runs Debian’s Emacs init files.

2. restore-emacs should be run every time you update your Emacs installed from source (e.g. with git pull), from the top-level source directory. It runs make install in the current directory, fixes some symlinks, and installs emacs-snapshot_1.0_all.deb, a package which provides Emacs to satisfy the dependencies of other packages.

Also, see https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=840793

In emacsen-common 2.0.8 at least (possibly earlier), and until the bug is fixed, /usr/lib/emacsen-common/packages/install/emacsen-common must be patched to make installation work; in emacsen-common 3.0.4 it’s at lines 14–15, which read:

(cd /usr/share/${flavor}/site-lisp
  ln -s ../../emacsen-common/debian-startup.el .)

should be replaced with:

ln -s /usr/share/emacsen-common/debian-startup.el /usr/share/${flavor}/site-lisp/