provide and eval-after-load

[Roland Winkler]

Symptoms:

I wanted to customize ediff-dir-diffs-buffer-map. So I put the
following into my .emacs.

(eval-after-load 'ediff-mult '(define-key ediff-dir-diffs-buffer-map ...

However, this gave me the error message

provide: Symbol's value as variable is void: ediff-dir-diffs-buffer-map

It seems to me that I get this error message because eval-after-load
is evaluated immediately after the (provide 'ediff-mult) at the
beginning of ediff-mult.el. If the (provide 'ediff-mult) appears at
the end of ediff-mult.el, everything is fine. Should (provide ...)
always appear at the end of the file? The documentation of provide
doesn't say that. Also, I believe that many packages have the
provide statement at the beginning of the file.

Or am I trying something illegal here?

In order to pin down the problem I played with the following two
files:

cat > foo.el <<EOF
(provide 'foo)
(defvar foo-buffer-map (make-sparse-keymap)
  "Keymap for foo mode.")
(define-derived-mode foo-mode fundamental-mode "foo")
EOF

cat > bar.el <<EOF
(eval-after-load 'foo '(define-key foo-buffer-map "q" 'quit-window))
EOF

Executing `emacs --no-init-file -l bar.el -l foo.el' gives me

provide: Symbol's value as variable is void: foo-buffer-map

If the (provide 'foo) is moved to the end of foo.el everything is
fine.

Roland