I recently had to update ldefs-boot.el because a new autoload cookie for a variable had been added. The autoload made its way into loaddefs.el but not into ldefs-boot.el. The strange thing was that when the autoload was needed and bootstrapping failed because it was not available, loaddefs.el had already been regenerated and the variable was already defined in it. But apparently only ldefs-boot.el and not the updated loaddefs.el had been loaded at that stage.
Is the moral of this story that each time that somebody adds a new autoload that is necessary for compilation during bootstrapping (as opposed to just an autoload that allows the user to call an interactive function without having to load the file first), one has to update ldefs-boot by overwriting it with a valid up to date copy of loaddefs.el? If so how many people are aware of this? >From the Changelog, it appears that ldefs-boot.el had to be updated four times for similar reasons. But my guess is that in the vast majority of cases, when people get an error message during bootstrap saying that a variable or function is not defined, they just add a require (or a defvar). There is no telling how many unnecessary require's have been added in the Emacs code because of this situation. I am not very familiar at all with the bootstrapping process and the various Makefile's, but I wonder whether there really is no better way to handle this. If not, we could see what could be done to make more people who contribute to Emacs CVS aware of the ldefs-boot.el situation; in particular, when it is necessary to update it and how it should be done. (I had to figure it out by doing a lot of grepping through the Makefile's and through the emacs-devel archives.) The comment in lisp/Makefile.in is less than self-explanatory: # Build loaddefs.el to make sure it's up-to-date. If it's not, that # might lead to errors during the bootstrap because something fails to # autoload as expected. If there is no emacs binary, then we can't # build autoloads yet. In that case we have to use ldefs-boot.el; # bootstrap should always work with ldefs-boot.el. No, it does not always work. (How could it?) It only works if you update ldefs-boot whenever needed. Sincerely, Luc. LocalWords: Changelog defvar _______________________________________________ Emacs-devel mailing list Emacs-devel@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacs-devel
