Re: Silent autoloading

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

>> > Maybe Tramp is a large package, but then "C-x C-f" is a very
>> > frequently used command.
>> Ah, yes, I see that for Tramp indeed.
>> How 'bout making Tramp output something before loading itself?
> I don't mind, but are we going to hunt down every slow-loading package
> and add a message to them as well?

> Why not the other way around: re-enable the "Loading..." messages by
> default and introduce a variable to suppress it?  Then Lisp code that
> needed this to be turned off (something with timers, IIUC) could
> simply bind that variable to an appropriate value when doing
> its thing.

No Lisp code needs it to be turned off.  It's just off because there's
no clear reason to have it turned on in most cases, and in some cases
those messages are annoying.

You're complaining about Emacs freezing for a little while without
giving any clue to the user about what's going on.  That's indeed
a problem.  But this rarely happens for autoloading, and in many cases
it happens independently from autoloading.

Maybe the right solution is to link this to the hourglass-mouse-cursor:
have a global variable busy-message, and when the
hourglass timer expires, not only we should change the mouse-cursor to
an hourglass, but we should also output the message currently stored in
`busy-message'.
This way, loading a file could set this var to "Loading <foo>..." and if
the loading takes a while (and only in this case), you'd get the
relevant message.  This would happen to work for autoloading as well as
for `require' and any other way to load a file.  And it could be used
in other situations (e.g. "Building completion table...").


        Stefan