Re: AUCTeX doesn't build with latest Emacs master

[Arash Esbati]

Hi Tassilo,

Tassilo Horn <tsdh@gnu.org> writes:

> Arash Esbati <arash@gnu.org> writes:
>
>> I'm not really familiar with this part of AUCTeX, can someone have a
>> look on this?
>
> Neither am I but...

Great, who will take care of this now? ;-)

> I think one problem is that loaddefs-generate doesn't care about
> specific files but generates autoloads for all files in the given
> directory.

Agreed, this also occurred to me.

> So auto-loads.el will probably contain preview autoloads and
> preview-latex.el will contain (la)tex autoloads.

Yes, this is exactly what happens:

-> diff -u auto-loads.el preview-latex.el
--- auto-loads.el       2022-08-09 21:40:55.030522600 +0200
+++ preview-latex.el    2022-08-09 21:40:59.360692900 +0200
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
-;;; auto-loads.el --- automatically extracted autoloads (do not edit)   -*- 
lexical-binding: t -*-
+;;; preview-latex.el --- automatically extracted autoloads (do not edit)   -*- 
lexical-binding: t -*-
 ;; Generated by the `loaddefs-generate' function.

 ;; This file is part of GNU Emacs.
@@ -308,7 +308,7 @@


 ;;; End of scraped data

-(provide 'auto-loads)
+(provide 'preview-latex)

 ;; Local Variables:
 ;; version-control: never
@@ -317,4 +317,4 @@
 ;; coding: utf-8-emacs-unix
 ;; End:

-;;; auto-loads.el ends here
+;;; preview-latex.el ends here


> But looking at the new loaddefs-gen.el, it seems that the preferred
> recipe in the modern emacs world is just to do
>
>   emacs -f loaddefs-generate-batch auto-loads.el .
>
> which has no counterpart in the obsolete autoload.el and doesn't allow
> for distinguishing different sets of files (auctex vs preview).

Also my observation.

> Why are our rules so complicated?

That's the question :-)

> We generate an auto-loads.el (which provides the feature auto-loads
> which in itself feels wrong)

Isn’t that feature written by Emacs itself?

> and then append it to tex-site.el.  Can't we just simply generate all
> autoloads (both auctex and preview) into tex-site.el and get rid of
> auto-loads.el and preview-latex.el?

This is actually what's currently happening: tex-site.el rule in
Makefile.in does this, IIUC.  And it looks odd at the end of the file
tex-site.el which looks like this:

  ;;; Generated autoloads from toolbar-x.el

   (autoload 'toolbarx-install-toolbar "toolbar-x")
  (register-definition-prefixes "toolbar-x" '("toolbarx-"))
  ^L
  ;;; End of scraped data

  (provide 'auto-loads)

  ;; Local Variables:
  ;; version-control: never
  ;; no-byte-compile: t
  ;; no-update-autoloads: t
  ;; coding: utf-8-emacs-unix
  ;; End:

  ;;; auto-loads.el ends here
  (provide 'tex-site)
  ;;; tex-site.el ends here

I'm not sure what's the best course of action?  Keeping backward
compatibility seems a little challenging to me.

Best, Arash