At 08:31 AM 9/17/99 -0700, Marco Melgazzi wrote:
>
> -> It also demonstrates why I'm such a stickler about people
> -> providing a COMPLETE and DETAILED description of their setup when
> -> reporting problems. Emacs is such a protean environment that it
> -> is virtually impossible to avoid setup problems and to diagnose
> -> them without knowing the setup.
>
>heh, this is more easily said than done, my current .emacs is 3500 lines
>long, and my site-lisp directory ( after some pruning due to some things
>finally in emacs 20.4) is approximately 20 megs ( including .elc files
>of course ). This makes sending a detailed description of my setup to
>anybody virtually impossible ;)
>
In that case, perhaps in the future, before running to this list for help,
you should try to reproduce the problem with a minimal .emacs file as
suggested by mkearney. This might require a little extra up front time and
effort on your part, but in the end it will save everybody time, yourself
included.
Note also that when I refer to a complete description of your setup, I
don't just mean your .emacs file. I also mean the version of the JDE you
are running, the version of Emacs, the platform, the version of the JDK,
and the output of any buffers involved in the problem. Any of these could
be critical in resolving a problem and it is not for you to decide what is
relevant, since if you knew you wouldn't need help.
Sorry to pick on you about this, but I want to be helpful as I can to as
many people as I can and this requires minimizing the amount of time wasted
just trying to ascertain the context of a problem.
- Paul
