Re: Changes in lisp/Makefile.in to skip preloaded files

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Miles Bader <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden, address@hidden
> Date: Tue, 06 Oct 2009 18:33:35 +0900
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:
> > P.S.  I generally find any Make or shell/Sed trickery misplaced in
> > Emacs Makefiles, since we have the full power of Emacs at our
> > fingertips.  Portability is one obvious advantage, but more
> > importantly, it sounds right, in the context of building Emacs, to use
> > Emacs itself wherever we can.  Otherwise, we appear as not believing
> > in the tool we are developing.  Don't you agree?
> 
> Well, of course that's only true if a built emacs is available at the
> point of invocation.

Agreed.  In the case in point, Emacs _is_ available, since we generate
loaddefs.el by running Emacs.

> Also, the elisp code to do a given text munging job is often quite a
> bit longer, because sed is designed specifically to do certain tasks
> very concisely.

Granted, if you switch tools, you frequently need to think about a
different solution, more in line with the spirit of the tools you
switch to.  That's what I did in the two suggested alternatives.

IOW, Sed is used here to produce a list of files, and there's more
than just the Sed way of doing that.  If we are to use Emacs, we need
to do it the Emacs way.