Re: [h-e-w] problems with source-directory

[Jason Rumney]

Jim Davidson <address@hidden> writes:

> Jason Rumney writes:
> 
> > The only places where I can find this used is `update-file-autoloads'
> > in emacs-lisp/autoload.el and `info-initialize' in info.el.
> > The former is only useful for regenerating loaddefs.el, and you would
> > only need to do that if you were hacking on the source. 
> 
> I'm using update-file-autoloads.  I often download packages that have
> ;;;###autoload directives in the code.  Every so often, I regenerate my local
> loaddefs.el so that these local packages have appropriate entries.  That
> way, the packages are autoloaded when needed.

Ideally, you should keep autoloads for external packages separate
from your Emacs distribution, so that when you upgrade Emacs, you do
not have to regenerate all those autoload statements again.

> 
> > It is not unreasonable to assume that the source should be
> > installed in such a case.
> 
> OK.  However, the problem is not with the fact that the source is installed,
> but that the value of source-directory is wrong.

Not if you are compiling yourself, which is the case where
loaddefs.el might need updating.

> If a utility like update-file-autoloads is going to use source-directory,
> the value should default to something real.

update-file-autoloads is not intended to be a "utility" it is
intended for emacs maintenance. If you wish to use it as a utility,
you should probably set generated-autoload-file to an absolute path
to a file in your site-lisp directory.

-- 
Jason Rumney