byte-compiling compressed files

byte-compiling compressed files

[Richard Stallman]

You can visit a compressed .el file, but you can't byte compile it.
Do people think it would be a good idea to add such a feature?

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Date: Mon, 13 Aug 2007 08:58:01 +0200
From: ESCOUFLAIRE Pierre-Louis <pierre-louis.escouflaire@eurocontrol.int>
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
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Subject: Re: Suggestion: elisp files compression

Hello,

"A picture is sometimes more valuable than 1,000 words", :) then...

The `ediff-util.el.gz' emacs byte-compilation (using the menu item in 
``Emacs-Lisp") reproduces the problem and outputs the following error 
message:

\f
Compiling file /home/esf/emacs-test/ediff-util.el.gz at Mon Aug 13 
08:28:10 2007
ediff-util.el.gz:68:32:Error: Cannot open load file: ediff-init.el


Note that the 'ediff-init.el.gz' file is in the same directory.
Then, what I mean by transparency is that it cannot open the gzipped 
file corresponding to the non-gzipped one.

A bit deeper into `ediff-util.el.gz' (line 68) shows a difference with 
previous lines that use `nil` rather than `'noerror` (column 32) and the 
`load` function description says:

If optional second arg NOERROR is non-nil,
report no error if FILE doesn't exist.


I am not sure to fully understand the meaning of the description (report 
no error = do not report error ?) but this could be a problem from 
NOERROR that should not report an error.


Thanks for your time and concern.

Regards,
Pierre-Louis ESCOUFLAIRE


Richard Stallman wrote:
>     The problem is that navigating through gzipped elisp source files is 
>     transparent but byte-compiling them is not (for files with dependencies).
> 
> I don't really understand what that means.  Could you explain?
> Could you state a precise test case?


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Re: byte-compiling compressed files

[Mathias Dahl]

> You can visit a compressed .el file, but you can't byte compile it.
> Do people think it would be a good idea to add such a feature?

I can see how it might be handy, but I cannot say that I would use it
much. How about other operations, like for example being able to copy
the uncompressed file to some place? An example:

C-x C-f test.el.gz RET ;; File opened and uncompressed.
M-x copy-file RET M-n ;; Doing this, test.el.gz is presented.

I could of course do C-x C-w to write the buffer contents to a new
file. Maybe there are similar scenarios?