Gerd Möllmann <gerd.moellmann@gmail.com> writes:

>>> Emacs is always dumped with a few buffers, because temacs needs them
>>> to do the dumping.  See this comment text from buffer.c:
>>>
>>> 	 Implementation notes: the buffers we carry from temacs are:
>>> 	 " prin1", "*scratch*", " *Minibuf-0*", "*Messages*", and
>>> 	 " *code-conversion-work*".  They are created by
>>> 	 init_buffer_once and init_window_once (which are not called
>>> 	 in the dumped Emacs), and by the first call to coding.c
>>> 	 routines.
>>
>> Thanks.
>>
>> So, one idea would be to try and move the creation of these buffers from
>> the init_*_once functions to the "normal" init functions, and see what
>> happens. One would also have to take a closer look at coding.c, of course.
>
> Actually, this is bug#59029, sort of.
>
> TLDR is that the code to dump itrees is there, somewhere in git, but has
> an infinite recursion bug. So, I guess it should first be tried to
> revive that code and fix it (tests should also exist, IIUC).

While I agree that dumping buffer overlays would be nice to have, I
think I found a simple workaround for the specific issue I reported.
We may simply make sure that the overlays do not belong to any buffer -
it is good enough for the purposes of reftex library, where the overlay
objects are created once and then modified by side effect for actual
use.

See the attached patch.