Re: Lisp files that load cl-lib in problematical ways

[Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>]

Hello, Richard.

On Wed, Oct 18, 2023 at 21:28:41 -0400, Richard Stallman wrote:
> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

> I've changed the subject line to match what we are talking about.

>   > 226 files, or 14%, use cl-lib at run time.

> These cases may be more or less problematical, but not necessarily
> equally so.

> Which of those files are usually loaded when you start Emacs with
> no arguments?  Those we should certainly fix.

With the following command, started from the lisp directory:

$ sed 's/^[^;]*(load "\(.*\)".*$/\1.el/; s/\.el\.el/.el/; t; d' loadup.el | \
sort | xargs grep -c "^[^;]*(cl-" | sed '/:0/d'

, I get the following files, with counts of '(cl-' usages:

abbrev.el:2
dnd.el:4
emacs-lisp/byte-run.el:1
emacs-lisp/cconv.el:15
emacs-lisp/cl-generic.el:178
emacs-lisp/cl-preloaded.el:45
emacs-lisp/eldoc.el:12
emacs-lisp/lisp-mode.el:14
emacs-lisp/nadvice.el:7
emacs-lisp/oclosure.el:31
emacs-lisp/seq.el:51
emacs-lisp/shorthands.el:1
emacs-lisp/syntax.el:6
emacs-lisp/tabulated-list.el:1
emacs-lisp/timer.el:1
font-lock.el:1
frame.el:6
international/mule-cmds.el:4
international/ucs-normalize.el:3
isearch.el:3
ldefs-boot.el:3
loaddefs.el:3
minibuffer.el:12
progmodes/elisp-mode.el:23
progmodes/prog-mode.el:1
register.el:23
replace.el:1
select.el:6
simple.el:9
startup.el:3
subr.el:1
tab-bar.el:4
term/android-win.el:7
term/haiku-win.el:11
term/ns-win.el:9
term/pc-win.el:7
term/pgtk-win.el:9
term/w32-win.el:12
term/x-win.el:8
uniquify.el:2
vc/vc-hooks.el:1

..  That's a total of 541 occurrences, just in the files that get dumped
with the Emacs binary.

I fear that that's the way things will stay, because it would be too
much work to fix.  But more because there are enough contributors who
think that cl-lib is just an ordinary part of Emacs to be used freely
without restraint.  I am not among this group of contributors.

> -- 
> Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
> Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
> Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
> Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).