Re: Problem with building Emacs diagnosed. Help please!

[Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>]

Hi, everyone!

On Fri, Aug 08, 2008 at 06:53:39PM -0400, Glenn Morris wrote:
> Alan Mackenzie wrote:

> > I am not prepared to check out the sources from scratch every time I
> > can't get a build working.

> I didn't mean that. I meant that you seem at the moment to have gotten
> into a very weird state somehow, and rather than trying to figure it
> out, it would be easier to throw it away and start again.

OK, I _was_ in a wierd state, and I've now tracked it down and fixed it.
The wierdness was a broken `hack-local-variables', which had the effect
that the setting of generated-autoload-file in the eshell/*.el files was
being ignored.  I'd hacked hack-local-variables a bit in the recent past,
but it was Yidong who committed the change, slightly altered.  My fault
for not being more careful!

In tracking down that problem, I've refactored autoload.el quite a bit.
I think it'd be worth committing, since it's simpler than the current
version.  I'll post it soon.

> If you get into the weird state again, then it makes more sense to
> investigate it. But for some hopefully transient, never-repeatable
> glitch, why bother?

Because I get build problems nearly every time I update.  Even though
I've managed to build Emacs now, I'm still getting seg faults on every
build.  I can just restart a build with 'make' a few times, and it gets
to the end in the end.  I've reached a point where I just can't take the
constant uncertainty and unreliability I see.  So I am going to get into
the innards of this, no matter how painful, until I can sort out build
failures rapidly and with only moderate pain.

> I update and build from CVS every day and almost never see build
> failures, and they are always rapidly fixed. I'm sure the same is true
> for others.

I update only every few weeks.  That's probably got a lot to do with it.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).