Re: Silent autoloading

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@IRO.UMontreal.CA>]

>> > Maybe the right solution is to link this to the hourglass-mouse-cursor:
>> > have a global variable busy-message, and when the
>> > hourglass timer expires, not only we should change the mouse-cursor to
>> > an hourglass, but we should also output the message currently stored in
>> > `busy-message'.
>> > This way, loading a file could set this var to "Loading <foo>..." and if
>> > the loading takes a while (and only in this case), you'd get the
>> > relevant message.  This would happen to work for autoloading as well as
>> > for `require' and any other way to load a file.  And it could be used
>> > in other situations (e.g. "Building completion table...").
>> That would be good.
> Except that, I think, it won't work on Windows, where atimer is not
> supported.

It has timers as well (e.g. those used for hourglass).  I'd think that
we would want to really integrate this directly within the hourglass
code, i.e. consider it as another form of "hourglass icon".  I.e hook
into show_hourglass/hide_hourglass.

> And what about Emacs on a tty, where there's no
> hourglass-mouse-cursor?

Indeed, currently Emacs on ttys doesn't use the hourglass timer because
it has no way to display the hourglass mouse cursor, so this proposition
would imply enabling it for ttys as well, where show_hourglass wouldn't
actually show an hourglass-mouse-cursor, but would still show the
busy-message.


        Stefan