Re: Regression in dump-emacs-portable

[Lynn Winebarger]

On Tue, Feb 14, 2023 at 9:23 AM Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
>
> > From: Lynn Winebarger <owinebar@gmail.com>
> > Date: Mon, 13 Feb 2023 20:13:22 -0500
> >
> > I also looked for tests of dump-emacs-portable in the test/
> > subdirectory, and grep reported nothing.  I can translate my shell
> > script into elisp to run under ERT, and add testing for each of the
> > libraries expected to be dumpable (in the sense of not requiring code
> > evaluated on load that needs to be delayed until run-time)
> > individually.  How do I submit that?  Are there any restrictions I
> > should observe?
>
> What do these tests actually test?

Whether libraries expected to be redumpable are in fact redumpable.
Almost every library in 28.2 could be redumped, excepting those which
simply failed to load for whatever reason.  Even the ones that need to
be delayed until initialization for practical reasons do not cause
dump-emacs-portable to fail.  A library changing from dumpable to
non-dumpable might be acceptable, but that change has to be known to
evaluate the tradeoff.  Additionally, whether the maximal set of files
expected to be redumpable is redumpable as a whole.  If the maximal
set can be redumped, then presumably any proper subset (closed under
require) could be as well.

Obviously someone's been optimizing something to see the maximal
redump size decrease by 45%.  The total number of libraries (excluding
the obsolete directory) appears to have decreased, but enough to
explain that much of a change in size?

Lynn