Re: reftex.el autoloads

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

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
>> 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.
>
> No, the motivation was to replace the hand-written autoloads that were
> there before.  See this message, where Stefan posted a short
> explanation:
>
>   http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2007-07/msg00263.html
>
> (Originally, these autoloads recorded the time of the update, which
> was a hassle discussed in that thread; that was replaced with a
> checksum to avoid changing the file too often when the autoloads
> didn't really change.)


Sure, I can see that, but I am wondering why the hand-written autoloads
were just not replaced with generated autoloads in loaddefs.el? That is
the simplest solution. Simple is good (so long as it's not simplistic).

Or, as an alternative, implied by this post:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2007-07/msg00320.html

> So I think this change in its current incarnation is for the worse.
> Maybe if the autoloads were written into files that are not in CVS I'd
> be happier.

Which was your comment at the time. In this scenario, the reftex-* files
would generate autoloads to reftex-loaddefs.el which reftex.el would
require. This preserves the current behaviour, but avoids files which
are both source and generated.

One response to this was:

> cvs already contains one generated file (configure script) and
> possibly others.

But configure isn't under versioning any more. And Stefan's MD5 patch
was the other. It's certainly true that Stefan's solution massively
reduces the problem, but it doesn't fix it, since a *build* can still
produce changes in versioned files.

Phil