Subject: Re: bug#25360: File mode specification errors during building

From: [email-masked] (Phillip Lord)
Date: Fri, 27 Jan 2017 16:25:04 +0000

Glenn Morris <[email-masked]> writes:

> Thanks.
> I can't decide whether modifying loadup.el for bootstrap-emacs in all
> cases is good, bad, or neither... :)

I worry about it slightly mostly because I'd rather not modify
loadup.el, especially given that the motivation is an error message that
isn't really causing any harm.

> Does it have any impact on the speed of builds, either way?

I checked whether my original modification made any difference, and the
answer is a few seconds. bootstrap-emacs is replaced by emacs after the
bootstrap build anyway (not sure why since actually, since I don't think
bootstrap-emacs is used again).

> (Eg no longer loading something that wasn't needed; or now autoloading
> every time something that used to be dumped.)

The former is true, but this *should* speed up the build (albeit only a
little). I don't think we are doing the latter, except for
'w32-convert-standard-filename and only on windows.

> BTW, did you consider using a non-Emacs method to generate the basic
> loaddefs?  Eg maybe find + awk would be good enough to extract the
> necessary autoloads to get a bootstrap going?

Yes, I did, but wasn't sure what extra dependencies the Emacs makefile
was allowed to have. I guess it already uses find and awk.

Also, I thought about building a bootstrap-emacs to generate loaddefs.el
(and nothing else), then another bootstrap-emacs to do what the current
one does. Or, split the loads and the bit which does the dump in
loadup.el and see if I could get temacs to do what bootstrap-emacs
currently does.

I was trying to be as conservative as possible, especially as the
dumping proceedure may change significantly soon. I guess my changes to
loadup.el do not qualify as that conservative now.

Phil