I am not quite so pessimistic about the possibilities of recompiling installed elisp files.
I see three situations where makefile do special things in order to compile elisp files: 1) generating/editing .el files (gnats and tm are examples of this) at build-time. This is not a problem since the generated .el file is installed as part of the .deb file. 2) .elc file is generated through other means than simple compilation. VM (at least at some point) had the option to concatenate all the little .elc files into one big .elc file. But I am pretty sure that (unless something really sick is going on in the .elc file generation) one would always be able to use the little files instead, perhaps with the appropriate amount of additional autoloads in the site-start.d file. 3) specific order of compilation is required. The problem here is (as I remember) mainly with macro expansion. Different solutions exists. Requiring the maintainer to extract a canonical compilation order from the build process is one (should then be handed to the elisp service handler). Fixing the source is another (if all files has the correct set of `requires', the bytecompiler should be able to figure out the rest on it self). A simple hack that probably would work quite a long bit of the way would be to sort the set of .el files according to the timestamps of the existing .elc and the compile in that order, though this certainly is less than robust. Does anybody know of a concrete example where recompiling a set of installed .el files in some specific (say alphabetic) order will fail? Gnus in the emacs distribution used to have this problem, I seem to remember, but it does not seem to be a problem in 19.34 (I maintain emacs under CVS which by default ignores .elc files and thus want to recompile lisp/). ---------------------------+-------------------------------------------------- Christian Lynbech | Computer Science Department, University of Aarhus Office: R0.32 | Ny Munkegade, Building 540, DK-8000 Aarhus C Phone: +45 8942 3218 | [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- www.daimi.aau.dk/~lynbech ---------------------------+-------------------------------------------------- Hit the philistines three times over the head with the Elisp reference manual. - [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Michael A. Petonic) -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .