Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!hplabs!hp-ses!hpcea!hpdtl!conway
From: conway@hpdtl.HP.COM (Daniel F. Conway)
Newsgroups: comp.emacs
Subject: Re: Re: Better error handling for .emacs
Message-ID: <6930010@hpdtl.HP.COM>
Date: 17 May 89 15:08:45 GMT
References: <8458@chinet.chi.il.us>
Organization: HP Design Tech. Lab., Palo Alto, CA
Lines: 24

pdg@chinet.chi.il.us (Paul Guthrie) writes:
> In article <822@pcsbst.UUCP> jkh@pcsbst.UUCP (jkh) writes:
> >Question: Is there some way to get more information than "Error in init file"
> >when emacs doesn't like your .emacs file?
> 
> This is what I use:
> 
> (setq debug-on-error t)
> 
> ; Rest of .emacs goes here
> 
> (setq debug-on error nil)

That was one of the first things that I tried when I got the message 'error in
init file'.  Unfortunately, setting debug on like this does not seem to take
effect until after the init file is read, at least not under version 18.52, so
I still get the bogus error message if my init file is bad.  I have found that
when this occurs, I can do a load-file in the scratch buffer with the init
file and find where the error is.  I'd still rather be able to get a
meaningful error message while the init file is being read instead of having
to do manual pushups to find the problem.

Dan Conway
dan_conway@hplabs.hp.com