Hi,

Sorry, I don't mean to hijack the conversation, but speaking of patches,
Stefan gave me an updated version of his patch recently. This one allows
byte-compilation of his ~/.emacs.d/package-fastpath.el file. I asked him
in private if he needs any further feedback several days ago, but I did
not receive a reply from him so I'll assume that it's okay to re-post
his patch here on the list.

I have attached two patches. One is the patch that he originally made
which applies to the Emacs trunk, and the other is for Emacs 25.3. Which
is my current working Emacs version. If anyone could provide further
feedback to Stefan to help him improve this patch, I'm sure he would
appreciate it and I would as well.

So far, I haven't noticed any significant performance improvements from
his patch. Although, with the byte-compilation in place (along with some
other optimizations to my startup code) my init time has gone down to
1.1 seconds. It was 1.4 seconds last time I reported about it on this
thread, I think.

Also, I have noticed (and I forgot to tell Stefan about this in our
private thread) that the bug which I noticed regarding info files from
ELPA is gone. I.e., this bug (which I reported on Jan 31):

"The info files for my packages from ELPA are all missing in the info
Directory node."

is no longer happening, so I guess Stefan has fixed it in this most
recent patch. Yay!

Unfortunately, I had more problems with byte-compilation when I had the
gh.el package installed. package-fastpath.el would refuse to
byte-compile. I have since uninstalled this package since I only had one
other package which was dependent on it and I haven't used it
recently. Stefan's patch probably needs some work in order to properly
deal with strange autoload files. However, the developer of gh.el is
currently trying to make its autoload file a bit lighter so this may not
be a concern much longer.

In any case, I think that Stefan's patch here is still the best solution
to the original problem posed by RMS at the inception of this thread. It
just needs some work. It is also improving startup time quite noticeably
for myself and I am sure that it will for others as well.

Thanks,
- George Plymale II