I've added another flag variable that allows me to turn off the ban on implicit loading in dump mode.
The dump with all ~2500 ELN libraries loaded completed last night. Unfortunately during startup (before any frame opens) one of them is evaluating an _expression_ with an argument that should never produce nil but somehow is nil.
Fortunately I can now redump with just the offending library in site-load. The error prints fairly quickly when run normally, but shared libraries evidently open a lot slower under GDB.
Hopefully I'll get the same error with the smaller dump and be able to determine if there's an issue in the dump file, the dump loading, or something else.
It started up fine when I only explicitly added the one library with the failing _expression_, and then again when I dumped after loading the original list up to that library.
The good news is that emacs starts in a couple of seconds with 1198 ELN files in the dump. I haven't been able to compile with profiling enabled on this system, but I can tell you that is a couple of orders of magnitude faster than just loading them in .init.
The bug seems to be from a couple of older (2010-2012) library files that are dynamically scoped and use copy-face with the "frame" parameter. All the other combinations I've tried start up without a problem, so I'm just going to leave these packages out of the dump. Also excluded are most lsp-mode libraries, because they seem to slow down the startup process (like 4 seconds instead of 2 or less}, vterm and zmq (dynamic modules can't be dumped), and a few modes that insist on attempting to download things on startup.
What's included:
All of CEDET
All files in emacs-lisp
Most if not all files in tramp/mail/net
Everything in progmode that doesn't depend on an external utility (namely moz) being installed
Any TeX or reference/citation functionality (reftex, bibtex, bibliography, citar, citeproc)
Icon/emoji/image support (e.g alltheicons, major-mode-icons)
All completion and widening/narrowing libraries - helm, ivy, counsel, company, auto-complete,
Perspective, window-purpose, and similar
Evil packages
Treemacs
Many other miscellaneous packages I'm forgetting.
All in the dump file is about 184 MB for an older Linux on an x86_64 architecture. That would include all the lsp-mode packages from Melpa, or at least the ones with more than a nominal number of downloads. There are 2000-2500 ELN files that will be loaded. When I loaded these from my init file I could make a cup of coffee, maybe do a crossword before it would be ready to use.
One of the packages with the dynamic scoping/face issues is tabbar-ruler, which I only started using during this exercise and think is fantastic. Hopefully it will work when required from the init file, as it does currently.
At any rate it's fantastic at startup. The customization interface is very responsive without the usual lag from lazy construction of the customization groups. I'll have to see how it behaves after it's been running a few days.
Lynn