The version of emacs 20.3-7 on ftp.debian.org is seriously screwed up. It gets various sorts of arithmetic errors, font-lock colors are psychedelic, customization gives messages saying "you shouldn't be seeing this", etc. I rebuilt the package from source on my system and now it seems healthy.
I ran across a bad bug in bits/endian.h which might be affecting any number of packages, possibly including emacs: it expects gcc to set __BIG_ENDIAN or __LITTLE_ENDIAN for it (there's a comment about how PowerPC can be either big- or little-endian). gcc doesn't do that, so endianness remains indeterminate. This is guaranteed to break things. I've submitted a bug report against libc6-dev 2.0.100-2. -Randy
