Re: Automatic bootstrap

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

>> A week or so there was a discussion about the inconvenience of the
>> existence of `make bootstrap'.  I suggested that we create a source
>> file bootstrap.el whose compiled file, bootstrap.elc, would control
>> whether `make emacs' does a bootstrap or not.  We could also change
>> bootstrap.el trivially after installing any change which we think
>> makes it advisable for testers to bootstrap afresh.

> I don't think it will work, as developers who make changes that make it
> advisable to bootstrap would forget to change that file.  Other developers
> might change it needlessly, causing testers with low end hardware
> unnecessary pain.

I tend to agree.  BTW, I'm playing around right now with a slightly
different dependency structure to make "make" do the bootstrap
automatically, so that "make bootstrap" is turned into "make
bootstrap-clean; ./config.status; make".  Basically, we always build
both `emacs' and `bootstrap-emacs', where `bootstrap-emacs' is the
executable used to compile the preloaded files.  The code I have now
kinda works, but it has some downsides.  Also, it's tremendously
difficult to make this work efficiently in the sequential case (avoid
redundant dumps and byte-compilations) and in the parallel case as well
(e.g. avoid building `bootstrap-emacs' multiple times in parallel).


        Stefan