Subject: Re: bug#58224: 29.0.50; "make bootstrap" spuriously warns: "comp.el newer than byte-compiled file"

From: Alan Mackenzie <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 1 Oct 2022 18:11:38 +0000

Hello, Stefan.

On Sat, Oct 01, 2022 at 18:10:19 +0200, Stefan Kangas wrote:
> Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]> writes:

> > (This has nothing to do with what Lars did, it's due to changes by
> > Alan to speedup the first stage of the bootstrap.)

> Oh, right.  I forgot about that.

> I'm copying in Alan, in case he has any comments.

Well, my thoughts back when implementing that speedup were that the
speedup was more important than a few irritating messages.  I suppose
that's becomng less true as the long delays from the past fade from
memory.

The particular message about "<file> newer than byte-compile file; using
older file" is hard-coded into Fload in src/lread.c.  It was considered
important enough to supersede the flag variable force-load-messages.  It
also supersedes the parameter NOMESSAGE to Fload.

I don't know why this message is considered so important.  Maybe we
might reconsider its importance.  But there are already two flag
variables meant to control messages from Fload, so adding a third
special one probably wouldn't be a good idea.

This doesn't seem like an easy issue to resolve without nasty special
case code.  Either that, or we reconsider the mechanism of making the
..elc files older to trigger make's recompiling of the .el files to .eln.
Maybe there's a better way of doing that.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).