Subject: bug#55109: Emacs build fails: Symbol’s function definition is void: byte-compile-set-symbol-position

From: Lars Ingebrigtsen <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 25 Apr 2022 15:40:12 +0200

Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]> writes:

> We don't really have any dependency tracking for Emacs Lisp files.  It
> would be a great addition, if someone develops that, I think, because
> such problems are quite frequent during active development.

It's a complicated problem, though -- basically if any file that defines
a macro/variable changes, then all .elc files that depend on it should
be recompiled.  Which means that if you make a trivial edit in files.el,
then that would trigger a compilation of absolutely all .elc files,
which would make development pretty much impossible.

We would have to arrange the Lisp sources in a very different way to
dependency tracking to be practical.

So instead people who pull Emacs have to say "make bootstrap" once in a
while.  It'd be nice if it were possible to have the makefile output
"Did you try 'make boostrap'?" if it fails, but that's apparently not
something make allows.

Anyway, closing this bug report.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no