Volunteers to implement test for stuff called at startup?

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

From time to time, as part of development, we install changes that
break some rare platforms or configurations.  One reason for that is
inadvertent calls during startup sequence to primitives that are
either not yet set up (because Emacs is in the middle of its startup),
or are simply not available in those rare configurations.

For example, a recent change caused process-list to be called very
early during startup.  The code that was installed was not intended to
run during startup, I think, so this was an inadvertent side effect.
If the fact that process-list is called when Emacs starts was evident
at the time, I'm sure several brows would have been raised, and the
author would have been asked to explain why that is needed, with the
result that this code could have been scrutinized in time for us to
either change it not to run during startup, or add some conditions
that would have avoided the trouble, or whatever.

So with this in mind, one idea that could help us detect similar
situations in the future would be to have a test in the test suite
that would record every primitive called during startup, compare it
against some expected list, and flag any changes (at least additions,
not sure about deletions).  Then both people who run the test suite
regularly and bots like Hydra could flag any changes and let us handle
these potential problems when they are young.

Does that make sense?  If so, would someone like to volunteer for the
job?

TIA