"H.-Dirk Schmitt" <d...@computer42.org> writes: I undertand you have a clear idea in your head of what's going wrong, but please try to answer the precise questions asked.
> As written in the report, no error message is shown during normally > processing with apt-get or dpkg. > > The error message was only shown by manually invoke: > `emacs24 -q -batch -l package --eval (add-to-list 'package-directory- > list "/usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/elpa-src") -f package-initialize -f > batch-byte-compile markdown-mode-autoloads.el markdown-mode-pkg.el > markdown-mode.el` Yes, but what _is_ the complete error message? > The root cause – the locked file - is outside the scope of the emacs > packages, so a „purge and reinstall“ approach will fail and the > situation will break the whole debian/ubuntu/… package update > processing till the next time emacs is invoked by root as „interactive“ > editor. Well, this might be true, but I currently don't know how to reproduce a file being locked at startup, when using emacs -q. It seems likely it has to be something specific to the setup of your machine. Have you edited /etc/emacs/site-start.d/50anything-el.el? Also, what is the complete list of startup files in /etc/emacs/site-start.d/ ? d
