Re: Updating autoloads, custom-deps, finder-data

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Sat, 20 Apr 2013 11:10:08 +0300
> From: Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden>
> 
> When any of the Lisp files are modified, typing "make" in the
> top-level directory byte-compiles those modified files, as expected,
> but does not invoke "make autoloads", "make custom-deps", and "make
> finder-data" targets.  Thus the autoloads and the other meta-data
> regarding the modified Lisp files slowly bit-rots, unless you manually
> invoke those targets or perform a full bootstrap.
> 
> Is this a bug in the build procedure, or am I missing something?

Btw, I did see this comment in lisp/Makefile.in:

  # custom-deps and finder-data both used to scan _all_ the *.el files.
  # This could lead to problems in parallel builds if automatically
  # generated *.el files (eg loaddefs etc) were being changed at the same time.
  # One solution was to add autoloads as a prerequisite:
  # http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-pretest-bug/2007-01/msg00469.html
  # http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnu-emacs/2007-12/msg00171.html
  # However, this meant that running these targets modified loaddefs.el,
  # every time (due to time-stamping).  Calling these rules from
  # bootstrap-after would modify loaddefs after src/emacs, resulting
  # in make install remaking src/emacs for no real reason:
  # http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2008-02/msg00311.html
  # Nowadays these commands don't scan automatically generated files,
  # since they will never contain any useful information
  # (see finder-no-scan-regexp and custom-dependencies-no-scan-regexp).

but it is unclear to me what's its conclusion.  Problems with parallel
builds can be taken care of by proper dependencies and/or by judicial
use of temporary files and move-if-change.  And the last sentence
seems to say that at least some of the problems no longer exist(?)

IOW, the status of this issue is unclear.

In addition, there's nothing at all here about autoloads.