Re: replacing ldefs-boot.el

[Phillip Lord]

Noam Postavsky <address@hidden> writes:
>> Disadvantages:
>>
>>  - generating ldefs-boot-auto is a lot slower (i.e. cp loaddefs.el
>>    ldefs-boot.el vs a complete bootstrap build of Emacs).
>>
>
> Is it possible another disadvantage would be that ldefs-boot-auto
> requires regeneration more often (because the list of autoloads used
> is more precise)?


No, I don't think that this is the case. ldefs-boot.el is actually
regenerated regularly IIUC (I think Glenn does it on a cron job; or he
gets up specially at 6am on the first of every month). And it changes
each time since it reflects changes in any autoloads any where in Emacs
(nearly), including things like documentation changes.

I have no idea what percentage of those commits are actually necessary
-- the unfortunate reality is that you can only test this with a full
bootstrap build which is something that most developers do rarely.


> I notice several almost duplicated lines in ldefs-boot-auto.el, like
>
> (autoload 'byte-compile "bytecomp" nil nil nil)
> (autoload 'byte-compile "bytecomp" nil nil t)
>
> byte-compile isn't a macro; I think you should put your addition to
> Fautoload_do_load after the "if (EQ (macro_only, Qmacro))" check to
> avoid falsely identifying macros.

Yeah, that's a screw up, thanks for picking this up.

I don't understand the semantics of the macro_only parameter, at all,
nor what that if statement is doing, but I'll try this fix.

> Instead of printing the autoload lines directly to stderr and then
> cleaning up afterwards, wouldn't it be simpler to collect them into a
> hashtable, and write to a file at the end?

Unfortunately not, because we are collating data from multiple
invocations of Emacs -- or rather temacs and bootstrap-emacs. We have to
store data in environment (i.e. a file), not in Emacs.


> And doesn't this change in Makefile.in break parallel 'make bootstrap'
> invocations?
>
> -bootstrap: bootstrap-clean
> +bootstrap: bootstrap-clean bootstrap-build
> +
> +bootstrap-build:

Does it? bootstrap-clean and bootstrap-build cannot be run in parallel
anyway. If it does cause issues, though, happy to remove; I added this
because it was useful during my development of the patch, rather than
because it was necessary.

Phil