[Discuss] Things in Hidden, Magic . Files

[kentborg at borg.org (Kent Borg)]

On 01/17/2018 01:40 PM, Mike Small wrote:
> Did you do an apt purge? I wouldn't think emacs package source files
> would be considered configuration but who knows.

I have now, no change.

Another check: I fired up a GUI session as my guest, opened a terminal, 
did "env" and saved the output, then fired an emacs from that terminal 
to verify it could do gdb right.

I did the same as me.

The differences were:

 ? - expected things like PIDs and X displays and path differences 
between the two users.
 ? - extra GOPATH variable and Go stuff at the head of my regular path, 
and Rust cargo stuff at the end.
 ? - my path included ~/bin
 ? - one user can do pdb

I have since gotten rid of the go and cargo stuff, moved ~/bin aside: 
Same thing.

> What about using emacs's own symbolic debugger to step through the elpy
> elisp code until things get weird?

At this point I am trying to get rid of elpy, and suspect I have--maybe 
something else broke pdb.

> You could try that
> and manually load the things you need for a basic Python debugging
> session.

Basic debugging works. What is missing is whatever magic pdb uses to 
tell emacs to do clever stuff to show me sources in another pane. And it 
isn't that emacs can't do /any/ such thing: gdb still knows how to show 
me a source pane and scroll the right thing into view. As for learning 
emacs's debugger and its lisp enough to debug pdb's GUI communications 
with emacs (something I know nothing about in the working case)...that 
seems daunting. Makes me think in more black-box terms.

What inputs does emacs get?

 ?- environment variables
 ?- /etc/emacs
 ?- the binary itself (both users are running the same one)
 ?- .emacs (neither user has one right now)
 ?- .emacs.d (both users have one, but just with auto-save-list in it)

What else does emacs see?

-kb