Re: "make autoloads" signals an error

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>
> Cc: wavexx@thregr.org,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Thu, 02 Jun 2022 13:20:03 +0200
> 
> Anyway, I'm testing the same in Emacs 28 just to see how it's supposed
> to work -- and is an out-of-build tree supposed to write the .elc files
> in the tree?  I.e., build/lisp/ remains empty after finishing the build?
> 
> (Except for a Makefile.)
> 
> The problem seems to be that loaddefs-gen tries to put the generated
> files into build/lisp/, and then Emacs can't find them.  So I'll adjust
> that to put them into lisp-directory instead.  But isn't this a bug?
> That is, an out-of-tree build shouldn't alter the source tree at all I'd
> have thought?

Ideally, it shouldn't modify the source tree, but:

  . if you build a release tarball, the *.elc files are already there
    in the source tree;
  . the *.elc files are platform-independent, so there shouldn't be a
    need to regenerate them for every build;
  . if you put the *.elc files in the build tree, you need to adjust
    load-path, since some of the files (the ones we don't
    byte-compile) will be in the source tree, and others in the build
    tree

So the reason(s) to make changes here are weak enough for us to punt ;-)