Re: Clarification of eval-after-load [was: Problem mit symlinks, locate-library and load-history]

[Stuart D. Herring]

> The use of symbols (as opposed to file names) here has only just been
> introduced into Emacs (sometime in Emacs 22), so there are many millions
> of (eval-after-load "foo" ....) forms in existing source throughout the
> Emacs universe.  We need to stay compatible with that source.

Yes, I realize that.  I was just being dumb and talking before reading; I
see now that exactly what I was suggesting is already implemented in
parallel with the filename system.  It seems to me that the simple way to
handle the real problem (rather than the one I fabricated) is to
fully-canonicalize (find real file name, find absolute file name, chase
symlinks) the arguments to both `eval-after-load' and `load' and compare
them (that is, use them to read/write the alist) afterwards.  But could
there be a problem where preloaded files didn't match on a different
machine?  If so, it might make sense to express the file names relative to
the entry of `load-path' that let them be found.  Of course, then you
couldn't chase symlinks.  Maybe during preloading `load-history' should
get the short names (e.g., "font-lock", "simple") of loaded files, and
then at real startup do the canonicalization before loading anything that
would need to use `eval-after-load'?  Since it'd only be preloaded files,
customizations to `load-path' would probably be irrelevant, so it would be
okay to resolve them before loading .emacs.

Apologies if this is uneducated rambling; I'm not too familiar with this
feature.

Davis

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