Re: loaddefs and provide

[Chong Yidong <cyd@stupidchicken.com>]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

>>> * calendar/calendar.el (cal-loaddefs):
>>> * calendar/diary-lib.el (diary-loaddefs):
>>> * calendar/holidays.el (hol-loaddefs):
>>> * eshell/esh-module.el (esh-groups):
>>> * mh/mh-e.el (mh-loaddefs): Load rather than require.
>
>> The removal of the provide statement from autoload-rubric was
>> undocumented (it's a separate issue from generated-autoload-feature).
>
>> If it was unintentional, I would prefer to put this back to how it was.
>
> I hesitated, but in the end, given the fact that we now use files whose
> non-directory names may clash, I think that auto-generating feature
> names from files is too risky and not worth the trouble (and
> generated-autoload-feature is not a solution since it is not at the
> right place, and actually there's no right place for it).

This is unwise.  There are several third-party packages that depend on
the old behavior (i.e. having a provide statement in the generated
loaddefs file).  The third-party version of CEDET is one example.

This change causes too much incompatibility.  We should revert it, at
least for the 23.2 release.