Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

> Do you have a complete step by step recipe that demonstrates the
> problem?  I tried the original instructions, but got no messages from
> flymake (except complaining that the .emacs file doesn't start with ;;;
> Commentary).

`elisp-flymake-byte-compile' is a flymake backend for the elisp-mode.

It runs emacs in batch mode with -Q flag as a child process to provide
diagnostics for the current buffer.

In this case the `load-path' of the child process includes only builtin
packages, while the `load-path' of the parent process includes all the
directories added by the normal bootstrap process.

The load-path for the child process is controlled with
`elisp-flymake-byte-compile-load-path'. By default, it contains only
current directory.

The following hack "fixed" the issue for me: