Re: Emacs fails to bootstrap, gnus / mh-e related

[Bill Wohler <wohler@newt.com>]

Miles,

Sorry for the long hiatus, but work (kepler.nasa.gov) has been keeping
me way busy.

Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org> writes:

> Andreas Schwab <schwab@suse.de> writes:
>>>    In toplevel form:
>>>    ../../../../src/emacs/devo/lisp/gnus/gnus-mh.el:38:1:Error: Symbol's function definition is void: mh-require-cl
>>
>> Do you have mh-e/mh-loaddefs.el?
>
> I have this:
>
>    ;;; mh-loaddefs.el --- automatically extracted autoloads
>
>    ;; Copyright (C) 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
>    ;; Author: Bill Wohler <wohler@newt.com>
>    ;; Keywords: mail
>    ;;; Commentary:
>    ;;; Change Log:
>    ;;; Code:
>
>    (provide 'mh-loaddefs)
>    ;; Local Variables:
>    ;; version-control: never
>    ;; no-byte-compile: t
>    ;; no-update-autoloads: t
>    ;; End:
>    ;;; mh-loaddefs.el ends here
>
>
> I gather it's supposed to contain something more?  What is supposed
> to update it?

Yes, as Andreas said, it should contain all of the autoloads.

Look for mh-autoloads in lisp/Makefile to see how it should be
created. In particular, the missing bits are created with the
following command:

        $(EMACS) $(EMACSOPT) \
           -l autoload \
           --eval "(setq generate-autoload-cookie \";;;###mh-autoload\")" \
           --eval "(setq generated-autoload-file \"$(lisp)/mh-e/mh-loaddefs.el\")" \
           --eval "(setq make-backup-files nil)" \
           -f batch-update-autoloads $(lisp)/mh-e

I pretty much copied the command that builds loaddefs.el.

> One thing that might be relevant:  My original command used make's -j4
> option (for parallel makes):  "make -j4 bootstrap".  When that failed, I
> redid it using a simple "make bootstrap", but perhaps if this file was
> somehow screwed up by the make -j4, and isn't being properly regenerated by
> "make bootstrap", that could be why it failed the 2nd time?

The mh-autoloads depends on $(lisp)/mh-e/mh-loaddefs.el, so if that
file existed, it wouldn't be rebuilt. If you remove it, and run "make
mh-autoloads" in the lisp directory, you should be set.

I just did an update after eons, and a make bootstrap (after a make
maintainer-clean) and the build proceeded without error.

Note that as you observed, we haven't touched MH-E (except for a few
minor bug fixes) since Emacs was frozen, nearly a year ago. I guess the
Makefiles aren't conducive to parallelism.

-- 
Bill Wohler <wohler@newt.com>  http://www.newt.com/wohler/  GnuPG ID:610BD9AD