Difficulties with elpa repository.

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hello, Emacs.

I've just cloned the elpa repository for the first time.  I'm not really
interested in its contents - I just want to run all the .el files past
the byte compiler to check for warning/error messages.

This has been difficult.  I followed the instructions to build elpa in
its README.  But that appeared to do very little, if any, byte
compiling.  It did, however, to my great surprise clone a copy of my
emacs-25 repository (which I had given with
EMACS_CLONE_REFERENCE=~/path/to/emacs-25).

Wanting to repeat the process, capturing stdout and stderr in files, I
did make clean.

Now nothing works.  I try make, and I get these errors:

    # Do them in a sub-make, so that autoloads are done first.
    make elcs
    make[1]: Entering directory '/home/acm/emacs/elpa/elpa'
    Byte compiling packages/ace-window/ace-window.el
    Loading /usr/local/share/emacs/site-lisp/kn-prefix.el (source)...
    Loading /usr/local/share/emacs/site-lisp/kn-linux.el (source)...

    In toplevel form:
    packages/ace-window/ace-window.el:63:1:Error: Cannot open load file: avy
    GNUmakefile:155: recipe for target 'packages/ace-window/ace-window.elc'
    failed

Looking into packages/ace-window, I find a simple Makefile, so simple in
fact, that it doesn't specify any dependencies, in particular of the
file "avy" (which a .el file attempts to load with (load "avy").

At this point, I feel like giving up.  It would appear elpa's main
Makefile hasn't provided for batch compilation of everything.

Am I missing anything?  If so, what?

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).