Re: Suppressing native compilation (short and long term)

[Rob Browning]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

> You should know that the problems you needed to address with the *.elc
> files don't exist with the *.eln files.  The *.eln files have version
> information of the Emacs to which they "belong" hard-coded into their
> names.

Right, I'd noticed that, and while I haven't fully understood the
expectations/semantics yet, I'd started to assume much of what you've
described.  I also assumed we'd need to understand things even better
before the Debian support is completely "ready" (right now we're working
all this out in unstable).

My current expectation is that if it ends up being feasible, we'll
probably want to treat the package-related .eln files like the .elc
files, and build them during the package install.  For example,
elpa-magit (the current magit add-on package) will want to generate both
the .elc and .eln files for all of its .el files when its turn comes
around during installs/upgrades.

I say that because if it's a single-user machine and the user invokes
"apt install elpa-magit", I'd imagine they're doing that because they
want to use magit, in which case it doesn't hurt to get the work out of
the way up-front, and it might help in that all the work will be
finished at once, so they won't incur costs (battery-consumption, etc.)
later, when they might not expect or want it.  (Not a critical issue,
possibly, but perhaps friendlier.)

And if it's a multi-user machine, with a lot of emacs users, at the
moment I don't see any reason to want to compile the same file 50 times
for 50 users (or even more than just once), incurring the attendant
power and storage costs.

> Yes, by changing native-comp-eln-load-path you should be able to avoid
> writing to the home directory of the user under whose credentials the
> installation runs.  If you need that.

OK, thanks much.
-- 
Rob Browning
rlb @defaultvalue.org and @debian.org
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