Re: Lisp files that load cl-lib in problematical ways

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2023 05:27:03 +0000
> Cc: Emanuel Berg <incal@dataswamp.org>, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> From: Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>
> 
> With the following command, started from the lisp directory:
> 
> $ sed 's/^[^;]*(load "\(.*\)".*$/\1.el/; s/\.el\.el/.el/; t; d' loadup.el | \
> sort | xargs grep -c "^[^;]*(cl-" | sed '/:0/d'
> 
> , I get the following files, with counts of '(cl-' usages:
> 
> abbrev.el:2
> dnd.el:4
> emacs-lisp/byte-run.el:1
> emacs-lisp/cconv.el:15
> emacs-lisp/cl-generic.el:178
> emacs-lisp/cl-preloaded.el:45
> emacs-lisp/eldoc.el:12
> emacs-lisp/lisp-mode.el:14
> emacs-lisp/nadvice.el:7
> emacs-lisp/oclosure.el:31
> emacs-lisp/seq.el:51
> emacs-lisp/shorthands.el:1
> emacs-lisp/syntax.el:6
> emacs-lisp/tabulated-list.el:1
> emacs-lisp/timer.el:1
> font-lock.el:1
> frame.el:6
> international/mule-cmds.el:4
> international/ucs-normalize.el:3
> isearch.el:3
> ldefs-boot.el:3
> loaddefs.el:3
> minibuffer.el:12
> progmodes/elisp-mode.el:23
> progmodes/prog-mode.el:1
> register.el:23
> replace.el:1
> select.el:6
> simple.el:9
> startup.el:3
> subr.el:1
> tab-bar.el:4
> term/android-win.el:7
> term/haiku-win.el:11
> term/ns-win.el:9
> term/pc-win.el:7
> term/pgtk-win.el:9
> term/w32-win.el:12
> term/x-win.el:8
> uniquify.el:2
> vc/vc-hooks.el:1
> 
> ..  That's a total of 541 occurrences, just in the files that get dumped
> with the Emacs binary.

Those use cl-lib during byte-compilation, they don't load cl-lib at
run time.  So this is not what Richard asked about, AFAIU.

> I fear that that's the way things will stay, because it would be too
> much work to fix.  But more because there are enough contributors who
> think that cl-lib is just an ordinary part of Emacs to be used freely
> without restraint.  I am not among this group of contributors.

We cannot possibly expect people to contribute code if we force them
not to use the macros they are used to.  If cl-lib is not loaded as
result, that is good enough for us, I think.