Re: Lisp files that load cl-lib in problematical ways

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

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  > and got the following results:

  > abbrev.el:2

A generally useful minor mode as abbrev.el should not load cl-lib.
Why does it?  I investigated.

abbrev--check-chars uses the macro cl-pushnew.  Generally we
arrange for cl- macros not to load cl-lib.  But cl-pushnew
is _defined_ in cl-lib.  It ought to be defined with and like
other cl- macros that are meant for users to use.

That's a bug, and probably not a deep one.  Would someone please fix
it?

I investigated byte-run.el.  I don't think it uses any cl- facility.
Rather, it declares a let-variable whose name starts with cl-.

I think that if we investigate the other general-purpose packages
in the list you posted (I copied it below), we wlll find many such bugs that
got in because developers were not on guard against them.

Once we fix them all, how about if we add a regression test
to verify that various packages anyone might load at any time
do not use cl-lib.  With that, bugs like this would get caught
right away.

Here's the list, with some files crossed off that I've just handled.

;; abbrev.el:2
dnd.el:4
;; emacs-lisp/byte-run.el:1
emacs-lisp/cconv.el:13
emacs-lisp/cl-generic.el:56
emacs-lisp/cl-preloaded.el:16
emacs-lisp/eldoc.el:6
emacs-lisp/lisp-mode.el:6
emacs-lisp/nadvice.el:2
emacs-lisp/oclosure.el:8
emacs-lisp/seq.el:25
emacs-lisp/shorthands.el:1
emacs-lisp/syntax.el:5
emacs-lisp/tabulated-list.el:1
emacs-lisp/timer.el:1
font-lock.el:1
frame.el:5
international/mule-cmds.el:3
international/ucs-normalize.el:1
isearch.el:3
ldefs-boot.el:3
loaddefs.el:3
minibuffer.el:12
progmodes/elisp-mode.el:11
progmodes/prog-mode.el:1
register.el:3
replace.el:1
select.el:3
simple.el:9
startup.el:1
subr.el:1
tab-bar.el:4
term/android-win.el:4
term/haiku-win.el:3
term/ns-win.el:2
term/pc-win.el:6
term/pgtk-win.el:3
term/w32-win.el:4
term/x-win.el:2
uniquify.el:2
vc/vc-hooks.el:1


-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)