Emacs: Generate autoloads during installation?

Emacs: Generate autoloads during installation?

[Pengji Zhang]

Hello!

I found that with the shipped Makefile, installing the Emacs Lisp 
package does not generate autoloads, even though many entry points 
have been marked with the autoload cookie. Namely, after:

    ./configure
    make
    make install

one still has to 'require' the library in order to use, say, 'M-x 
notmuch'. That is a minor annoyance to me because in my workflow I 
often need to start a few Emacs instances, and loading Notmuch and 
all its dependencies is not trivial on my machine.

I wonder if we could generate and install a 'notmuch-autoloads.el' 
file as well during installation, like mu4e[1]. So we only need to 
load that file at Emacs startup, which should be much cheaper.

Thanks in advance!

Cheers,
Pengji

[1] https://github.com/djcb/mu/blob/af6ca080a4d956a0c706f5a01b767435d372ffd6/mu4e/meson.build#L110-L120

Re: Emacs: Generate autoloads during installation?

[David Bremner]

Pengji Zhang <me@pengjiz.com> writes:

>
> I wonder if we could generate and install a 'notmuch-autoloads.el' 
> file as well during installation, like mu4e[1]. So we only need to 
> load that file at Emacs startup, which should be much cheaper.

Currently notmuch-autoloads.el is generated by package.el
during installation. To try it out, run

        make elpa

then

        M-x package-install-file notmuch-emacs-$version.tar

I guess as long as it did not break the various package.el workflows, we
could consider running the same auto-generation code at build time.