Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bbn!jr@bbn.com
From: jr@bbn.com (John Robinson)
Newsgroups: comp.emacs
Subject: Re: Better error handling for .emacs
Message-ID: <40186@bbn.COM>
Date: 19 May 89 13:52:03 GMT
References: <8458@chinet.chi.il.us> <6930010@hpdtl.HP.COM>
Sender: news@bbn.COM
Reply-To: jr@bbn.com (John Robinson)
Organization: BBN Systems and Technologies Corporation, Cambridge MA
Lines: 24
In-reply-to: conway@hpdtl.HP.COM (Daniel F. Conway)

In article <6930010@hpdtl.HP.COM>, conway@hpdtl (Daniel F. Conway) writes:
>	      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.

How about leaving the (setq debug-on-error t) in your .emacs, and
starting emacs this way when you have problems:

emacs -q -l ~/.emacs

If emacs had the right function, you could leave the debug-on-error
out of .emacs and issue:

emacs -q -f set-debug-on-error -l ~/.emacs

or maybe there should be a run-time switch to have this effect.

/jr
/jr, nee John Robinson	 What a waste it is to lose one's mind--or not
jr@bbn.com or bbn!jr	  to have a mind.  How true that is. -Dan Quayle