I completely understand the problem of slow a slow emacs startup - that's
actually why i started using use-package.
So behind the scenes, use-package creates all these autoloads to speed up
startup.

On Wed, Jul 27, 2016 at 10:25 AM, Mosè Giordano <mose@gnu.org> wrote:

> Hi Caleb,
>
> 2016-07-27 17:51 GMT+02:00 Caleb Rottman <crottman@sci.utah.edu>:
> > Here are my two cents as a somewhat average emacs user (then I'll butt
> out
> > and let you all decide what you want to do).
> >
> > I have around 30 packages that I install through ELPA. Since this is
> pretty
> > unwieldy, I have these all configured using the "use-package" macro,
> which
> > will automatically download missing packages and `require' them as
> > necessary. This makes installations on new machines really simple.
> >
> > However, since AUCTeX doesn't have any (require 'auctex) line,
> use-package
> > will fail and AUCTeX won't install. That means that out of the 30
> packages I
> > have, I am required to install AUCTeX manually. Now that I know that
> AUCTeX
> > will work when you just install it, it is indeed not too hard to get
> AUCTeX
> > working. However, my main hangup in this whole issue is that I expected
> > AUCTeX to work like all the other packages I use.
> >
> > So it's not that AUCTeX is hard to install per se, it's just that it's
> > different than all the other 30 packages that I use. This, in my
> experience,
> > has always made AUCTeX confusing to me in the past.
>
> Thanks for sharing your experience.  I understand your position, but the
> "problem" with the use of `require' is that loading in this way many
> packages
> sensibly slows down startup of Emacs.  Ok, one should never close at all
> Emacs,
> but sometimes happens :-)
>
> Instead, a smarter approach to load packages is to call them when they're
> needed, for this purpose one can use `autoload' combined with
> `eval-after-load`
> (or the recent `with-eval-after-load').  I don't have use-package, I wrote
> my
> init file by myself, and I have few packages that are actually `require'd,
> the
> others are autloaded.  I find this way very effective, because not of all
> packages I set up in my init file are actually used in all Emacs sessions
> I fire
> up.  Maybe use-package allows you to do something similar for other
> packages.
>
> Bye,
> Mosè
>