Thomas S. Dye <address@hidden> wrote:
Thanks Bernt,
So, "broken custom settings" appear to be the cause of the unexpected
behavior. Two questions:
1) Do programmers have a name for this situation, where custom
settings seemed to work perfectly for a long time but then failed
noticeably with the introduction of new, correct code into
the .emacs?
I don't think so.
2) Is there a useful strategy for finding the minimal .emacs that
illustrates the failure? I might have 100 customizations in the
various starter kit configuration files. If combinations of
customizations are a possibility, I'm looking at quite a bit of
random
experimentation without some kind of strategy.
Bisection is about the only reasonable strategy, short of oracular
guesswork. I have a single .emacs that's (mostly) a sequence of
(conditional) loads/requires of individual package config files. I
just
comment out the whole thing, verify correct operation, and then
uncomment out the first/second half and try again. With 100
packages, 7
cycles will get you down to a single package and then you just do the
same thing within the package config file. Given a reproducer that you
can run in batch mode, this goes fairly quickly.
HTH,
Nick