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With emacs-21.3-3, if I start emacs, type some text, type M-<, and then type C-w, it beeps and says, "The mark is not active now." This behavior was not present in emacs-21.3-1. I traced it to the fact that transient-mark-mode is set to true in default.el. Perhaps this is a bug in transient-mark-mode; the description of the variable certainly doesn't imply that this behavior should occur. In this case, I suppose you should report it upstream. Independent of that, I don't think it's appropriate for Red Hat to set transient-mark-mode in default.el. It's a personal user preference, and I believe the default should be left as shipped by the FSF.
The behaviour is better documented in the emacs info manual. However I agree forcing this on old users is perhaps not right. I can either move it back into "/etc/skel/.emacs" and make it a defvar instead so that it is easy for experienced users to override it in their own .emacs file.
I meant "... OR make it a defvar..."
Btw if you don't want to use the settings in "default.el" you know you can also set "(setq inhibit-default-init t)" in your .emacs file.
In emacs-21.3-8 I commenting out transient-mark-mode in the .emacs skel file too.
*** Bug 102441 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***