How to use starter kit with desktop.el and other init-dependant functions?

[lrcg]

First, thank you for making a literate version of starter kit (and Org Babel for that matter). It's been a tremendous learning experience and the structure and literate format makes it much easier to understand what is going on and what I was thinking when I made decisions.

Now, the part that leaves me scratching my head for the past few days is this: is there any way to avoid using emacs's Customize facility and custom.el? The only thing missing from this setup is literate documentation of variables set through M-x customize-*, so I've tried to move as many of them as possible into <username>.org. But some built-in functions seem to rely on variables being set before after-init-hook is called whereas starter kit kicks into action after all packages are loaded.

I submit the following as an example. I'd like to document (desktop-save-mode 1) in <username>.org. I've tried all sorts of tricks to set it and then call (desktop-read), but I always start getting random errors such as:

File mode specification error: (error "Don't know how to make a localized variable an alias")

It seems that desktop.el is designed not to work the way I would like it to as can be seen in the last few lines of the file:

;; ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
;; When `desktop-save-mode' is non-nil and "--no-desktop" is not specified on the
;; command line, we do the rest of what it takes to use desktop, but do it
;; after finishing loading the init file.
;; We cannot use `command-switch-alist' to process "--no-desktop" because these
;; functions are processed after `after-init-hook'.
(add-hook
  'after-init-hook
  (lambda ()
    (let ((key "--no-desktop"))
      (when (member key command-line-args)
        (setq command-line-args (delete key command-line-args))
        (setq desktop-save-mode nil)))
    (when desktop-save-mode
      (desktop-read)
      (setq inhibit-startup-screen t))))

So is there any way of setting desktop.el to load the saved desktop on startup without essentially rewriting that code into <username>.el? And beyond that specific example, is there a particular pattern or technique that would make it possible to document all settings from /Customize/?

I guess a line could be added to init.el which would look for something like starter-kit-init.org and execute that code as part of init.el, but I didn't want to go down that path unless there is no other / better way.

[eschulte]

I've occasionally added lines directly to init.el when I need something loaded before the after-init-hook or before the full starter kit. Perhaps adding a couple of lines to init.el to load a starter-kit-init.org or starter-kit-preload.org or somesuch if it exists would be generally useful...