Re: reftex.el autoloads

[Phillip Lord]

Paul Eggert <address@hidden> writes:

> On 12/11/2015 09:46 AM, Glenn Morris wrote:
>> I don't see a need to change something that works.
>>
>
> But it doesn't work. At least, not for me. Too often I deal with spurious
> autoloads-related diffs that get in the way of real work. I often see them in
> 'git diff' output and have to remember that they're not real diffs. Once or
> twice I even committed them by accident to my own repository.
>
> This problem has been a nagging low-level build hassle for some time. It's not
> urgent to fix. But if someone has the time, it'd be nice to fix it.

I am reticent to change things which I don't fully understand, so here
is my understanding of the world at the moment.

AFAICT, the use of autoloads in reftex.el started with 41116c5a in
2014-03, which was Glenn's commit. The idea is, I think, that reftex
defines a number of "global" autoloads, as well as a set of internal
autoloads. Loading reftex runs the internal autoloads which then load
the rest of reftex lazily.

If this is the case, I can see no reason why the autoloads cannot be
redirected to reftex-loaddefs.el which is not versioned, and have
reftex.el require this (I have tried this and it seems to work).

I'm also a little uncertain why the "internal" and "global" autoloads is
necessary. Is is just for performance? On my machine, reftex and
associated files load in somewhat less than a tenth of a second. Why not
put all autoloads into loaddefs.el?

Phil