Re: Changes in lisp/Makefile.in to skip preloaded files

[Glenn Morris <rgm@gnu.org>]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

>> so this change will now cause autoloads to appear out of date after
>> every configure.  Is that what you really want?  Should autoloads
>> depend on src/Makefile.in instead?

It need not depend on either, as the comment indicates. That was just
to make any error message clear in the unlikely error that
src/Makefile was missing. The dependency can just be removed.

>> Similar with the preload= thing: why not run Sed on src/Makefile.in?

Because Makefile.in does not have the appropriate platform specific
list of dumped files, only the generated Makefile does.

> I think I see the reason for the latter: it's because src/Makefile.in
> spells out $lisp spanned over many lines, whereas src/Makefile has
> them all in the same line, which simplifies the job of th Sed script
> to some extent.

That's just a nice bonus, the real reason is above.

> Anyway, I cannot say that I like this solution.  In particular, it
> cannot be ported to w32, because the list of preloaded files is too
> long and overflows the max size of command lines on some Windows
> systems (lib-src/makefile.w32-in breaks it into 3 lists for that very
> reason).
>
> I can think about 2 alternatives which are better (IMO):

Feel free to change it as you see fit.

> P.S.  I generally find any Make or shell/Sed trickery misplaced in
> Emacs Makefiles, since we have the full power of Emacs at our
> fingertips.

As Miles has said, sed is already used, along with grep, throughout
the Makefiles. It is the simplest tool for this job.

BTW, no real harm results if this change is simply never synced to
windows.