Annoyed by speedbar

Annoyed by speedbar

Just now I tracked down a configuration bug in emacs. Cut to the ending: Speedbar had installed into etc/emacs/site-start.d an overly vigorous configuration file which did things I didn't want. Without telling me.

Backstory: I had tried out CEDET a month or so ago. CEDET emcompasses speedbar, EDE, EIEIO, and other emacs devel tools. EDE the project manager was what I was interested in. (Didn't choose it. I chose project-buffer-mode instead)

I fetched it via Debian aptitude, which automatically installs it. When EDE absolutely wouldn't start, I uninstalled CEDET.

An hour ago when I went to post Review of What If the Earth Had Two Moons? it complained that it couldn't find a file called sb-html. I know very well that org2blog doesn't require this file, because I wrote org2blog. And I know that it was never an issue before, because I tested org2blog meticulously.

So what changed? Finding one change in the whole huge system is a chore not to be taken lightly. I started by using dired search in the packages that I knew had changed recently, org-mode and project-buffer-mode. Nothing about sb-html.

I started another emacs, hoping to find what added the sb-html requirement. To my surprise, it was already present at startup! I know it's not in my customizations, and a quick search confirmed this, so how did it get there.

my-site-start was great about helping. In addition to organizing my emacs startup files, I can binarily divide my load sequence just by renaming a debug file. But when I moved the debug file to first place, 00debug.el, the unwanted config was still there.

So what in .emacs loads before my-site-start does it's work? Not much, and all quickly ruled out.

This could have been very frustrating, but fortunately I thought of etc/emacs. A quick check with dired search revealed the culprit to be speedbar, or rather its configuration file, which for some reason didn't get removed.

All of CEDET's config removed, and problem solved.