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-q option in load script


I believe the -q switch is used so that it can be ensured that
emacspeak is loaded before anything else. This approach is a bit out
dated IMO. 

Some years ago, when you installed emacs, you pretty much just got a
bare bones installation and most of the add-on packages you had to
install by hand. This meant that most of the additional packages were
loaded by the users .emacs file. 

Since then, most of the major Linux distributions now provide a much
richer emacs support structure with lots of popular emacs add-on
packages also provided within the distributions native package
management system i.e. rpm, deb etc. Along with this, new setup
structures were also introduced which are usually based on the rc
style initialisation used by many Linux distributions. 

With this sort of setup, there is usually a /etc/emacs/site-start.d
directory which contains individual initialisation *.el files for each
of the add on packages. This makes installation and removal of add on
packages very straight forward. Most of these files start with a
number, which allows you to control the order in which the files are
loaded. 

This can be a bit of a problem for emacspeak. Its important emacspeak
is loaded prior to most of these packages to ensure reliable
functionality. However, these packages are loaded before your .emacs
is read, so if you load emacspeak from your .emacs file, its not going
to be loaded until after all these other packages have been loaded. 

For this reason, I stopped using the .emacs file to load my emacspeak
a while back. Instead, I created a file called 10emacspeak.el and put
it in /etc/emacs/site-start.d. As it starts with 10, this tends to be
lower than any of the other add-on packages, so it is run and
emacspeak is loaded before anything else. 

this means I can just type emacs and emacspeak will be installed. Of
course, this won't be very popular if you share your box with other
emacs users.

I'm running under Debian and can provide my script if you want.
However, it would need to be modified for other Linux flavors and I
also have it fairly heavily customized for my own needs - for example,
I use an environment variable called SPEECH_SERVER to control whether
I run emacspeak or speechd. 

One thing to be careful about when using this approach is to ensure
that the first thing your startup *.el file does is test to see if
emacs is being run interactively or not. I only load emacspeak if
emacs is being run interactively. If you don't do this, emacspeak will
be loaded when any batch processing occurs. this can cause problems
when your system attempts to install new or upgraded elisp packages as
it is common for the installation to run emacs in batch mode to
compile the packages. 

HTH

Tim

Alastair Irving writes:
 > Hello
 >  
 > Whilst looking at the emacspeak script provided to launch emacspeak 23,
 > I noticed that emacs is invoked with the -q option.  Could someone
 > explain the reasoning for this, and if anything problematic will occur
 > if I remove it.  Whilst it is there, the emacs-customise interface is
 > unable to save settings to my .emacs file.
 >  
 >  
 > Alastair Irving
 > e-mail (and MSN): alastairirving19@xxxxxxxxxxx
 >  
 >  
 > <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
 > <HTML><HEAD>
 > <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=us-ascii">
 > <TITLE>Message</TITLE>
 > 
 > <META content="MSHTML 6.00.2900.2802" name=GENERATOR></HEAD>
 > <BODY>
 > <DIV><SPAN class=144424020-09032006><FONT face=Arial 
 > size=2>Hello</FONT></SPAN></DIV>
 > <DIV><SPAN class=144424020-09032006><FONT face=Arial 
 > size=2></FONT></SPAN>&nbsp;</DIV>
 > <DIV><SPAN class=144424020-09032006><FONT face=Arial size=2>Whilst looking at 
 > the emacspeak script provided to launch emacspeak 23, I noticed that emacs is 
 > invoked with the -q option.&nbsp; Could someone explain the reasoning for this, 
 > and if anything problematic will occur if I remove it.&nbsp; Whilst it is there, 
 > the emacs-customise interface is unable to save settings to my .emacs 
 > file.</FONT></SPAN></DIV>
 > <DIV><SPAN class=144424020-09032006><FONT face=Arial 
 > size=2></FONT></SPAN>&nbsp;</DIV>
 > <DIV><SPAN class=144424020-09032006><FONT face=Arial 
 > size=2></FONT></SPAN>&nbsp;</DIV>
 > <DIV><SPAN class=144424020-09032006></SPAN><FONT face=Arial size=2>Alastair 
 > Irving</FONT></DIV>
 > <DIV dir=ltr align=left><FONT face=Arial size=2>e-mail (and MSN): <A 
 > href="mailto:alastairirving19@xxxxxxxxxxx">alastairirving19@xxxxxxxxxxx</A></FONT></DIV>
 > <DIV dir=ltr align=left><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT>&nbsp;</DIV>
 > <DIV>&nbsp;</DIV></BODY></HTML>

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