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: Thu, 10 Dec 2015 11:03:30 +0000
>> 
>> --- a/lisp/textmodes/reftex.el
>> +++ b/lisp/textmodes/reftex.el
>> @@ -2397,7 +2397,7 @@ reftex-report-bug
>>  ^L
>>  ;;; Start of automatically extracted autoloads.
>>  ^L
>> -;;;### (autoloads nil "reftex-auc" "reftex-auc.el"
>> "cf606f7918831321cb46f254436dc66e")
>> +;;;### (autoloads nil "reftex-auc" "reftex-auc.el"
>> "7c0e0b46919f4ceefe1026e31e73ebcd")
>>  ;;; Generated autoloads from reftex-auc.el
>>  
>>  (autoload 'reftex-arg-label "reftex-auc" "\
>> 
>> 
>> So, it appears that reftex.el is actually partially real source and
>> partially generated during the normal build, which doesn't seem a good
>> thing to me.
>
> These are autoloads.

Yes, I know!

> Several files, reftex.el among them, record autoloads for their parent
> packages. Other examples include dired.el, esh-groups.el, and
> rmail.el. Grep the Lisp files for 'generated-autoload-file:' (without
> the quotes), and you will see them all.

So, quite a lot of files seem to set generated-autoload-file to
loaddefs.el which seems a bit odd (since it's the default). Of the rest,
it looks like dired, rmail, reftex and eieio do this (esh-groups.el
is pure autoload -- is not versioned).

I am not sure why only reftex.el causes me problems -- why not the
others, I wonder?

Also, the changed line is actually this...

>> +;;;### (autoloads nil "reftex-auc" "reftex-auc.el" "7c0e0b46919f4ceefe1026e31e73ebcd")

which is a comment. I don't know what this line does in the autoload
process.



>> And is there a good way to fix it?
>
> You mean, for the bisect script?  Just "git checkout" the offending
> file after the build, that's all.

I was thinking more generally. Having files which are generated in
versioning is never great (c.f. issues with ChangeLog).

Phil