bug#73812: 30.0.91; ERC 5.6.0.30.1: Customizing erc-modules loads ERC when starting Emacs

[Corwin Brust <corwin@bru.st>]

Hi All,

On Fri, Nov 1, 2024 at 9:05 PM Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> "J.P." <jp@neverwas.me> writes:
>
> I can only add that some of our users are very concerned with Emacs's
> startup time, and spend a lot of time optimizing it.  Unexpectedly
> pulling in all of ERC in some cases certainly won't help them.
>
> > "J.P." <jp@neverwas.me> writes:
> >
> >> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> >>
> >>>> All in all, I'd prefer to leave this alone in Emacs 30.  We have time
> >>>> to try reverting this on master and seeing whether it's a net win or a
> >>>> net loss, given the past history of the issue.  (AFAIU, if you remove
> >>>> this line, some change is pertinent in the manual?)
> >>
> >> It's been reverted on master for ten days now with no complaints:
> >>
> >>   https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/commit/?id=1854f275
> >>
> >> If that's long enough to qualify as a net win, can we proceed with a
> >> backport?
> >
> > It's been two weeks now since I was tasked with reverting this on master
> > in order to assess the damage, of which none has since been reported.
> >
> > Apologies if I'm out of line in pressing the issue, but I'm driven by a
> > need to advocate for ERC's users, who've suffered greatly in the past
> > due to my cowardliness in similar situations [1]. As such, I would very
> > much appreciate a final verdict on this matter.
>
> I assume that we are talking about cherry-picking commit 1854f2751e3f to
> the emacs-30 branch.
>
> Can removing the autoload cookie cause an issue outside of ERC, or for
> non-users of ERC?  If it cannot, I don't know that I'm in a better
> position than you, being the ERC maintainer, to determine what kind of
> negative impact removing it might have.  If anything, it sounds like it
> is more risky for non-users of ERC to leave things as is?
>
> In summary, my view is that removing it should be low risk, and it fixes
> a known bug.  It's arguably minor, but does affect startup performance.
> So I think it sounds good to have the patch on emacs-30.
>
> Let's see if Eli or Andrea has anything to add here first, though.
>

Thank you JP and Stefan for diligence on this.  I had flagged this for
a reply but did not manage to make one before now.  (Two weeks
already?  Good grief.)

Perhaps importantly: I strongly suspect this bug is responsible for
corruption of my customize file.  (Unfortunately I had a bunch of
stuff in there and wasn't good and pushed my changes to that
particular file to the repo where I version my config, so I've lost a
bit of work.  On the plus side: it's generally of a cosmetic nature,
mostly face tweaks which I found it convenient to "try out" using
customize and then, because they were good, never got around to
encoding into proper elisp.)  I didn't/haven't completed any sort of
minimal reproducer: I could be completely wrong that this bug is what
caused my configuration settings to get blown away.  But the timing is
right.

I will also mention, back to the "known issue" caused by this, that I
maintain separate "desktop shortcuts" for launching Emacs with and
without automatically launching ERC connections.  It would be nice if
this arrangement (once again) had the intended effect of not loading
ERC when I'm not going to need it in the given session.

In any event: +1

I'd be grateful to see this resolved before cutting 30.1