Re: Problem with building Emacs diagnosed. Help please!

[Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>]

Hi, Glenn,

On Sun, Aug 03, 2008 at 02:59:05PM -0400, Glenn Morris wrote:
> Alan Mackenzie wrote:

> > As I've said once or twice recently, whilst 'make bootstrap'ping, I've
> > been getting the error message

> Has anyone else seen this? Do you see it in a fresh checkout?

A fresh checkout builds "OK", for the following value of "OK": After
doing ./configure and make bootstrap, the build crashes with
(presumably) a segmentation fault (it said "error 6", or something
similar).  After doing "make" ~10 times, emacs was built.  At each
attempt, it crashed with a seg fault.  I think there's a memory leak
here, but I've said that already.

> It works for me, and I don't see that there is anything wrong here.
> Sorry you're having problems.

Thanks!

> >     Loading loaddefs.el (source)...
> >     Symbol's function definition is void: eshell-defgroup

> eshell-defgroup does not appear in my loaddefs.el.

It doesn't appear in my new-checkout build, but it does in my usual
Emacs-23, in respect of files
em-{alias,banner,basic,cmpl,dirs,glob,hist,ls,pred,prompt,rebind,script,smart,term,unix,xtra}.el.
In fact, that's pretty much every lisp file which has ;;;###autoloads.

Somehow, autoload.el is failing to redirect the autoloads to the correct
output file (here, eshell/esh-groups.el).

[ ..... ]

> > , i.e. the problem is that `eshell-defgroup' is defined after it is used.

> eshell-defgroup is not autoloaded. It is defined in eshell.el, which
> all the files that use it require. The above line you quote should not
> be in any generated file, not is it for me. I think your build is
> messed up.

Apologies.  I inserted ";;;###autoload" on eshell-defgroup myself, in an
attempt to get things working, then forgot about it and got thoroughly
confused.

> > Glenn, when you changed the eshell source to use `eshell-defgroup'
> > instead of just plain old `defgroup' (to which it is aliased anyway)
> > on 21st May 2008, was there some overwhelmingly important reason? 

> ... when I made the change for a reason, yes. To replace homegrown
> eshell code with the normal autoload mechanism.  Autoload treats
> defgroup specially, eshell needs the whole definition in esh-groups,
> hence the alias subterfuge. I believe it works fine.

Ah, right, I see.

> I think your build tree is messed up somehow.

> I think you have misdiagnosed the problem. Any problem that might
> exist must be due to the build not starting from a clean state for
> some reason.

Yes.  But I'm so sick and fed up of not being able to build routinely, I
am going to track down this problem even if it takes me weeks to do it.
I am not prepared to check out the sources from scratch every time I
can't get a build working.

Refactoring autoload.el might be a good first move.

> Sorry, I'm on vacation and it's hard for me to investigate.

Thanks for taking the time to put me right!  I hope you're enjoying it!

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).