Re: Suppressing native compilation (short and long term)

[Gregory Heytings]

> I agree with the above.  But then why did you say that my description 
> was inaccurate?

I did not say that, or at least I did not mean to say that.  I only tried 
to clarify something that seemed unclear, namely that eln files are not 
present in the package, but generated at installation time.  It's a subtle 
difference, but it seems important in the current discussion.

> What you described matches what I wrote perfectly: the end result, after 
> installing Emacs and elpa-magit, is that the *.eln files are available 
> for all the *.el files and stored in shared directories.  Whether those 
> *.eln files are produced on the system where the package is packaged or 
> as part of the installation is not important; the important part is that 
> all the *.eln files are there after the installation, and therefore 
> there's no need to disable JIT compilation.  And yet Rob says that he 
> thinks there _is_ a need for disabling it.

If I understand Rob's initial message correctly, this subtle difference is 
relevant:

> Perhaps relevant in other contexts, but at least in the context of 
> Debian work, we'd like to be able to suppress all native compilation in 
> some contexts, or more specifically all writes to HOME (or really, to 
> avoid any implicit file manipulations[1]).
>
> One key case is package builds and package installs (whether the emacs 
> packages themselves, or any of the various emacs add-on packages (e.g. 
> elpa-*)).
>
> For package builds, HOME is typically set to /nonexistent (or similar), 
> and for package installs we don't want the install commands (preinst, 
> postinst, etc.), which are running as root, to write anything to /root/.

IIUC, what Rob wants is that

(1) on Debian systems on which Emacs packages are built, the build process 
is running as root, and nothing should be written in /root, and

(2) on user systems on which elpa-* packages are installed, the 
installation process, during which el files are compiled to elc and eln 
files, is running as root, and it should not write anything in /root.