Re: Suppressing native compilation (short and long term)

[Sean Whitton <spwhitton@spwhitton.name>]

Hello,

On Fri 30 Sep 2022 at 04:56PM +03, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> This is what I'm asking about: what exactly triggers the compilation?
> Just installing a package shouldn't do that, only loading it into
> Emacs should.

We currently bytecompile during package installation, and would like
also to do the native compilation at that time.

The main reason for bytecompiling at package installation is that we
have logic to purge and recompile anything whose dependency versions
have changed, which means that all bytecode installed on Debian systems
was generated using known-correct macro definitions.  Historically
ordinary Emacs processes running in non-batch mode have not guaranteed
this; I recall that the Org-mode developers discouraged use of ELPA to
install newer versions of Org because of these sorts of issues.

A secondary reason is that it makes sense to compile once, system-wide,
rather than repeatedly in each user's home directory.  It is also nice
that you can know everything is already in place once your package is
installed, so that I can unplug my laptop once the package manager has
exited, and I know that it isn't going to do any CPU-intensive
compilation and drain my battery.

-- 
Sean Whitton