Re: Wrapping an Emacs dynamic module in a package

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Joris Vankerschaver <joris.vankerschaver@gmail.com>
> Date: Mon, 17 Oct 2016 09:34:25 +0100
> Cc: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
> 
> 1) I wrote an emacs module _mymod.so, as well as wrappers mymod.el (with
> some local setup) and mymod-pkg.el (which only has a call to
> define-package).
> 
> 2) I tarred these together to form mymod-0.1.tar
> 
> 3) I installed the resulting package using M-x package-install-file
> 
> In my messages buffer, I see that Emacs tries to generate autoloads for the
> .so, and fails with the error indicated in the original email ("_mymod.so:0:0:
> error: scan-error: (Containing expression ends prematurely 238020
> 238021))").
> 
> I'm pretty confident that the emacs module is correctly built (I can load
> it, and run the functions in it). Also, if I rename _mymod.so to something
> else, e.g. _mymod.blablabla, the rest of the package installs correctly and
> can be loaded. So it really seems as if Emacs is choking on trying to
> generate autoloads for _mymod.so.
> 
> Maybe backtracking a little bit:
> 
> 1) Should Emacs be able to generate autoloads for an .so?

No, I don't think so.  I think you should have these autoloads in the
Lisp part of your package.

So I suggest to review your definition of the package that package.el
uses to decide which files to scan for autoloads, and perhaps change
it to not imply that _mymod.so should be scanned.

Caveat: I have never prepared any package using the package.el
infrastructure, so I could be wrong in what I write above.  Or it
could be a bug in package.el, in which case I suggest to report it,
including all the details, using "M-x report-emacs-bug RET".

Thanks.