Re: Current CVS doesn't bootstrap

[Luc Teirlinck]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

   Are you saying that a bootstrap should always be preceded by a "make
   maintainer-clean"?

If you want to be _completely_ sure that your version of Emacs is
fully up to date.  I believe that there are two situations where
people usually run `make bootstrap': if they experience problems or if
they have a fast computer.  In case of problems, I believe it is
advisable to run `make maintainer-clean'.  If your computer is fast
enough, the entire purpose of running the `make bootstrap' sequence is
to be completely safe, so it would be inconsistent not to run `make
maintainer-clean'.  Apparently Stefan knows a counterexample to these
rules.

   If so, why doesn't "make bootstrap" does the equivalent of "make
   maintainer-clean" automatically?

It used to do so.  Then Stefan changed it to speed up bootstrapping.
But we have had plenty of bug reports because of this.  As already
mentioned, we had a discussion on this and I believe that Stefan
agreed that `make bootstrap' should be reverted to its old behavior,
and that a new target `make bootstrap-build' should do what the
current `make bootstrap' does.  Maybe some of the imperfect, but fast,
proposed partial solutions could be applied to this new target.  They
would not make it 100% safe, but much safer than it is now.

   (Btw, I still didn't see any explanation why a "cvs up" that updates
   easymenu.el causes a failure to load cl-macs, which was the specific
   problem I reported.  Without seeing such an explanation, this entire
   argument sounds a bit academic to me.)

It would be, if this were the only instance of the problem, but it is
just the latest in a long list.  It is very far from the first and if
nothing is changed it will be very far from the last.

Sincerely,

Luc.