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

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Ihor Radchenko <yantar92@posteo.net>
> Cc: stefankangas@gmail.com, gregory@heytings.org, rms@gnu.org,
>  emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Tue, 24 Oct 2023 12:41:13 +0000
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> >> > Sure, but that's rather subjective.  One could also argue that it is a
> >> > good thing to have certain symbols available immediately, for example
> >> > because they are typically needed.
> >> 
> >> Could it be customizeable somehow?
> >
> > What do you want to be customizable, and how?
> 
> What I have in mind is a custom list of packages to be dumped.

You can easily edit lisp/loadup.el and add whatever you want.  So this
possibility already exists.

> >> I have seen articles using portable dumper to pre-load more libraries,
> >> but it was rather cumbersome and fragile exercise. It might be of
> >> interest for people interested in reducing the startup time to have
> >> a command like M-x dump-emacs-using-already-loaded-built-in-libraries.
> >> That way, users can pre-load the libraries that will be loaded anyway.
> >
> > Isn't that already available using dump-emacs-portable?  Or am I
> > missing something?
> 
> (1) It does not work interactively.

Doesn't M-: work?

> (2) Even making it work non-interactively is not necessarily trivial.
>     See 
> https://archive.casouri.cat/note/2020/painless-transition-to-portable-dumper/index.html

These are bugs we still need to find and fix.  But adding arbitrary
Lisp packages to loadup.el is also likely to cause bugs, since
dumping Emacs is a tricky business in any case.