Re: master 859190f 2/3: Convert some keymaps to defvar-keymap

[Gregory Heytings]

> > To reply to your question anyway: perhaps I'm misunderstanding 
> > something, but I don't see why this would in itself imply preloading 
> > anything new. The (fboundp 'kbd) check, and checking that the return 
> > value of safe_call1 is non-nil (which I didn't do in the proof of 
> > concept) means that this would not have any effect until subr.el and 
> > edmacro.el (there's no "kbd.el", so I guess you mean "edmacro.el") are 
> > loaded.
>
> I understand, but edmacro is not preloaded, and files we do preload, 
> like bindings.el, call define-key all over the place.  Letting all those 
> calls fail, albeit silently, would not be useful, not if we want to be 
> able to use 'kbd' syntax freely in preloaded files.  So I'm not sure I 
> understand how your proposal will work in practice.

The question (at least as I understood is) was to make it possible for 
users (in their init files) and third-party packages to use a more 
readable syntax for key bindings, without wrapping each key binding in a 
call to kbd.  That would have been a first step towards phasing out the 
"strings where every char represents an event" syntax.  Perhaps the check 
for (fboundp 'kbd) could have been replaced by a (will_bootstrap_p () || 
will_dump_p ()) check to avoid the unnecessary calls during bootstrap.

A second step would be to preload edmacro-parse-keys, to make it possible 
to use the kbd syntax in other preloaded files too.