ELC files inside Emacs releases

ELC files inside Emacs releases

[Philippe Vaucher]

Hello,

Emacs 24.4 and 26.3 at http://mirror.inode.at/gnu/emacs/ contains .elc
files (I suspect all of them do).

Maybe that's the right thing, but can someone explain why? In my
understanding, those are built when you build Emacs, and thus
distributing those looks like a mistake (takes bandwidth and size that
could be avoided).

Maybe the distribution script forgets to `git clean -fdx`?

Kind regards,
Philippe

Re: ELC files inside Emacs releases

[Andreas Schwab]

On Mai 30 2020, Philippe Vaucher wrote:

> Maybe that's the right thing, but can someone explain why?

ELC files are architecture independent.

> In my understanding, those are built when you build Emacs,

Users are not expected to do that.

Andreas.

-- 
Andreas Schwab, schwab@linux-m68k.org
GPG Key fingerprint = 7578 EB47 D4E5 4D69 2510  2552 DF73 E780 A9DA AEC1
"And now for something completely different."

Re: ELC files inside Emacs releases

[Alfred M. Szmidt]

It is intentional that .elc files are part of the source distribution
tarball, it is so that users don't need to build them when they build
Emacs -- they are architecturally independant, and it saves time.

This is very common in GNU projects where we try to build anything
that doesn't need to be built later for the user, saving them time.

Re: ELC files inside Emacs releases

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Andreas Schwab <schwab@linux-m68k.org>
> Date: Sat, 30 May 2020 21:25:59 +0200
> Cc: Emacs developers <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
> 
> On Mai 30 2020, Philippe Vaucher wrote:
> 
> > Maybe that's the right thing, but can someone explain why?
> 
> ELC files are architecture independent.
> 
> > In my understanding, those are built when you build Emacs,
> 
> Users are not expected to do that.

Indeed.

Byte-compiling all the *.el files takes time, so we distribute the
*.elc files to make the build much faster.

Re: ELC files inside Emacs releases

[Philippe Vaucher]

> Byte-compiling all the *.el files takes time, so we distribute the
> *.elc files to make the build much faster.

Thank you all for the clarifications.

Philippe