Re: reftex.el autoloads

[phillip.lord@russet.org.uk (Phillip Lord)]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: phillip.lord@russet.org.uk (Phillip Lord)
>> Date: Sat, 12 Dec 2015 18:24:24 +0000
>> Cc: Glenn Morris <rgm@gnu.org>, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>,
>> 	emacs-devel@gnu.org
>> 
>> I am reticent to change things which I don't fully understand, so here
>> is my understanding of the world at the moment.
>> 
>> AFAICT, the use of autoloads in reftex.el started with 41116c5a in
>> 2014-03, which was Glenn's commit.
>
> I don't understand why you single out reftex.el.  If this issue should
> be resolved, it should either be resolved the same way for all of the
> files that similarly store autoloads, or for none at all.  It makes
> very little sense to solve it only for reftex.el.

Oh, just because it was the one that broke my bisect. Of course, you are
right that it should be resolved for all files, not just reftex.el. But
I need to understand why one file is the way that it is first.

I think that I have found all the other incidences now. These are

dired.el
htmlfontity
ibuffer.el
rmail.el
ps-print.el

Of these, ps-print.el was Stefan's commit in 2007. All the others were
Glenn, over a spread of years (unto 2014 for reftex).

I'm guessing the motivation for all of these was the same -- faster
loading of loaddefs.el, and lazy loading of other parts of subsidiary
files. If this is the motivation I wonder whether it holds as true in
2015 as it did in 2007.

Phil