Forgetting to update one's loaddefs.el may yield much more varied and
less easily recognized classes of problems than INSTALL.CVS suggests.
If ldefs-boot.el got updated, updating Emacs will work fine, but if
the user did not update his loaddefs.el, errors will occur when
actually running the updated Emacs. For instance, some users are
currently experiencing problems with the newly autoloaded
`desktop-buffer-mode-handlers'.
On my machine updating autoloads takes only a fraction of a second.
On slower machines, it maybe could take a few seconds, but that may be
worth avoiding periodic problems. I guess that people who regularly
update Emacs use a script, so that typing is not a problem. Assuming
that we are not going to make any changes to lisp/Makefile.in that
could get rid of the problems automatically, what about the following
change to INSTALL.CVS, which would recommend to always update
autoloads. It would save CVS users the time to worry about fake bugs
and file bug reports on them and save us the time to have to
investigate these reports.
===File ~/INSTALL.CVS-diff==================================
*** INSTALL.CVS 02 Apr 2004 12:04:32 -0600 1.3
--- INSTALL.CVS 14 Aug 2005 11:06:17 -0500
***************
*** 18,23 ****
--- 18,24 ----
$ ./configure
$ make
$ cd lisp
+ $ make autoloads EMACS=../src/emacs
$ make recompile EMACS=../src/emacs
$ cd ..
$ make
***************
*** 25,43 ****
(If you want to install the Emacs binary, type "make install" instead
of "make" in the last command.)
! Occasionally the file "lisp/loaddefs.el" will need be updated to reflect
! new autoloaded functions. If you see errors about undefined lisp
! functions during compilation, that may be the reason. Another symptom
! may be an error saying that "loaddefs.el" could not be found; this is
! due to a change in the way loaddefs.el was handled in CVS, and should
! only happen once, for users that are updating old CVS trees.
!
! To update loaddefs.el, do:
!
! $ cd lisp
! $ make autoloads EMACS=../src/emacs
!
! If either of above procedures fails, try "make bootstrap".
Users of non-Posix systems (MS-Windows etc.) should run the
platform-specific configuration scripts (nt/configure.bat, config.bat,
--- 26,32 ----
(If you want to install the Emacs binary, type "make install" instead
of "make" in the last command.)
! If the above procedure fails, try "make bootstrap".
Users of non-Posix systems (MS-Windows etc.) should run the
platform-specific configuration scripts (nt/configure.bat, config.bat,
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