Subject: bug#6401:

From: "Tim Daly Jr." <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2011 09:34:17 -0800

On Nov 22, 2011, at 9:29 AM, Glenn Morris wrote:
> 
> I'm ignorant of all this. What do child processes of Emacs need these
> variables for? Can you give me one example of something I might want to
> run inside an emacs M-x shell buffer that needs to know EMACSDATA? It's
> not set in shells spawned by a GNU/Linux build.
> 
> Also, don't you get a clear error about the charsets directory not being
> found if EMACSDATA is wrong (from init_charset), rather than a failue to
> load some particular charset? Which makes me think this is probably not
> the problem the OP was having anyway...

It's a warning:

      dir_warning ("Error: charsets directory (%s) does not exist.\n\
Emacs will not function correctly without the character map files.\n\
Please check your installation!\n",
                   tempdir);
      /* TODO should this be a fatal error?  (Bug#909)  */

what actually stopped my build was an error about loading that JIS charset.

-tim