Re: Recent changes to dired.el and info.el

[Thien-Thi Nguyen]

Luc Teirlinck <address@hidden> writes:

> I am suspicious about this because somebody else reported bugs
> concerning `desktop-buffer-mode-handlers', info and dired that
> definitely were only due to failure to update loaddefs.el.
> 
> Assuming the bugs your changes are supposed to fix are real and not
> just a local problem (I can not understand why there should be a
> dependency bug given the fact that `desktop-buffer-mode-handlers'
> is autoloaded), there would very likely be similar problems in
> hilit-chg.el, mh-e/mh-e.el and mail/rmail.el.  But let us first make
> sure that the bugs you experience are not just a local problem and
> that using `eval-after-load' is really necessary.

the desired behavior is ability to load/use info, dired, rmail, without
having to load desktop.el.  if i don't use desktop.el, i don't want it
loaded (or autoloaded), *ever*.  if neighborly callback bits are deemed
necessary to be placed in these other files, that's fine, as long as
loading desktop.el is not a requirement for or a by-product of their
use.  (basically, the autoload mechanism answers a timing question, with
the dependency implicitly agreed-upon, but here we have a dependency
that is not agreed-upon -- that is the bug.)

as for how to fix the bug, one way is `eval-after-load'.  another is to
do more drastic re-org (like removing the `add-to-list' calls entirely).
what other options exist for expressing such "subjunctive dependency"?

thi