Re: Recursive compilation?

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>
> Date: Sat, 04 Jun 2011 17:54:41 +0200
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> > There's a controversy about that, because there are legitimate and
> > important use cases where Stefan's simpler solution causes trouble.
> 
> I think I missed that discussion.  Do you have a recap, by any chance?

The one use case I remember is when you are developing a Lisp package
and it is not yet ready for prime time (e.g., loading it would break
Emacs).

> In any case, I think it would make sense to make this an option.  For
> instance, a new variable `byte-compile-load-newest-file' defaulting to
> nil.

If foo.el requires 'bar, and bar.elc is outdated, won't loading bar.el
make the result of compiling foo.el less optimized?

> The obvious use case would be for the Emacs makefiles to set that
> to t before compiling the .el files, which I'm sure would save us all a
> bit of time over the coming years.

Even in the Makefile's, I'm not sure it should be an obvious default:
there could be important use cases when you'd want the warning/error
even when building Emacs, e.g. when making a release or pretest
tarball.