do-after-load-evaluation

[Noah Friedman]

The following change:

    2006-05-24  Alan Mackenzie  <address@hidden>

            * lread.c (Vafter_load_alist): doc-string: state that an element
            now has a regexp to match file names, not a file name as such.
  
breaks backward compatibility because now the after-load forms for "foo"
will be evaluated when "foobar" is loaded.

This is not backward compatible and it breaks things in a bad way, because
lots of packages have a common prefix, and it's not really possible to have
the same alist values for all versions of emacs.

If there were some new syntax for regexp members, e.g.

      ((:re "regexp")  forms...)

then an assoc in older versions of emacs won't match and the new syntax
won't confuse them.

So I propose making that change.


Besides that, the existing implementation looks only halfway finished to
me.  Why does Fprovide still use the old hardcoded Fassq+Fprogn evaluation
method?  It should call do-after-load-evaluation too and that function
should do the right thing for symbols.