Re: AUCTeX doesn't build with latest Emacs master

[Tassilo Horn]

Arash Esbati <arash@gnu.org> writes:

Hi Arash,

> I'm not really familiar with this part of AUCTeX, can someone have a
> look on this?

Neither am I but...

> I played with it and come up with this to reanimate my AUCTeX
> installation, but it doesn't look right to me.
>
> -AUTOLOAD=--eval '(let ((autoload-file (expand-file-name "$@"))) \
> +AUTOLOAD=--eval '\
> +(let* ((autoload-file (expand-file-name "$@")) \
> +       (autoload-file-dir (file-name-directory autoload-file)) \
> +       (autoload-file-name (file-name-nondirectory autoload-file))) \
>    (mapcar (lambda (file) \
> -            (update-file-autoloads file nil autoload-file)) \
> +            (if (fboundp (quote loaddefs-generate)) \
> +                (loaddefs-generate autoload-file-dir autoload-file-name) \
> +              (update-file-autoloads file nil autoload-file))) \
>            command-line-args-left) \
>    (save-buffers-kill-emacs t))'
>
> -PREVIEW_AUTOLOAD=--eval '(let ((autoload-file (expand-file-name "$@"))) \
> -  (update-file-autoloads "preview.el" nil autoload-file) \
> +PREVIEW_AUTOLOAD=--eval '\
> +(let* ((autoload-file (expand-file-name "$@")) \
> +       (autoload-file-dir (file-name-directory autoload-file)) \
> +       (autoload-file-name (file-name-nondirectory autoload-file))) \
> +  (if (fboundp (quote loaddefs-generate)) \
> +      (loaddefs-generate autoload-file-dir autoload-file) \
> +    (update-file-autoloads "preview.el" nil autoload-file)) \
>    (save-buffers-kill-emacs t))'

I think one problem is that loaddefs-generate doesn't care about
specific files but generates autoloads for all files in the given
directory.  So auto-loads.el will probably contain preview autoloads and
preview-latex.el will contain (la)tex autoloads.  loaddefs-generate has
an EXCLUDED-FILES argument, so that could be used to inhibit that.

But looking at the new loaddefs-gen.el, it seems that the preferred
recipe in the modern emacs world is just to do

  emacs -f loaddefs-generate-batch auto-loads.el .

which has no counterpart in the obsolete autoload.el and doesn't allow
for distinguishing different sets of files (auctex vs preview).

Why are our rules so complicated?  We generate an auto-loads.el (which
provides the feature auto-loads which in itself feels wrong) and then
append it to tex-site.el.  Can't we just simply generate all autoloads
(both auctex and preview) into tex-site.el and get rid of auto-loads.el
and preview-latex.el?

Bye,
Tassilo