bug#41646: Startup in Windows is very slow when load-path contains many entries.

[Nicolas Bértolo]

> You may be surprised how many users of GNU/Linux consider 5 sec during
> startup an unacceptable slowdown.

Me too. But I had given up on it until I read how it was implemented.

> 'chmod' doesn't access the file, it only accesses the directory.  So
> it could be much faster.

As far as I can see there is no way to issue a call to 'chmod' that does not
try to change the permissions of the file passed. I will try to do it
with access().

> Is this supposed to work only when packages are installed by
> package.el?  What about manual installation?

Everything should work OK as long as you provide a load-cache.el file in the
directory you add to load-path. We could provide a function to generate it
automatically.

Thanks, Nico