Subject: Re: bug#52969: Shortdoc "string" group leads to backtrace

From: Stefan Monnier <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 03 Jan 2022 16:05:12 -0500

Lars Ingebrigtsen [2022-01-03 21:37:42] wrote:
> Stefan Monnier via "Bug reports for GNU Emacs, the Swiss army knife of
> text editors" <[email-masked]> writes:
>> 1- Forget about autoloads's docstrings altogether (i.e. always load the
>>    autoload's target when we need the docstring).
>> 2- Revert part of 59732a83c8 so that we still keep the docstrings of
>>    `lisp/loaddefs.el` in etc/DOC.
>> 3- Byte-compile `lisp/loaddefs.el`.
>> I pushed a patch which does n°2.
> Are there any disadvantages to doing n°3?
> I liked the simplifications in 59732a83c8.

I haven't tried yet.  I installed n°2 because it's the "safe choice".
We can still choose n°3 and/or n°1 which both have a wider impact.
I liked the simplifications in 59732a83c8 as well, and we do keep some
of them.

As for disadvantages to n°3, I remember trying it out some months ago but
I can't remember why nor can I remember why I haven't kept this change
in my local hacks.  Sorry.

IOW, someone will have to try it.
Of course, there are the obvious disadvantages of spending time to
compile `loaddefs.el` and the added space used by `loaddefs.elc`, tho
a lot of it would be recovered by the space saved in etc/DOC.

        Stefan