generate-file-autoloads-1 (autoload.el)

I recently worked on autoload.el to add support for autoloading functions defined in modules, as part of work on modularizing the core. I'll share that work soon. While absorbing generate-file-autoloads-1, I noticed a few things that either puzzled me or struck me as wrong. Can somebody check me here? 1) There is a while loop near the end with most of the body commented out. The comment says, in part, "Emacs -- I still haven't figured this one out." Given the code that surrounds this while loop, it appears that the loop is doing nothing but wasting time by going to the end of a line, and then to the next line, repeatedly until reaching output-end. How about commenting out the entire loop? 2) The "Generating autoloads for..." message uses trim-name, but the corresponding "done" message uses file. That means that the messages look like this: Generating autoloads for autoload.el... Generating autoloads for /i-unpacked-xemacs-here/lisp/autoload.el...done The last message should use trim-name, too. 3) The algorithm for finding the next autoload cookie when funlist is nil (so that dolist is also nil) looks odd to me. Look for the while loop that starts just after the "Generating autoloads" message. The while loop condition is effectively that we have not reached the end of the buffer. Then we skip forward over whitespace characters. Now we evaluate the cond. Unless we happen to be right on an autoload cookie, we do not take the first clause. That means that we skip over whatever comment or sexp we happen to be looking at and go around the loop again. While this works, it means that we are examining the file comment by comment and sexp by sexp to try to find an autoload cookie, instead of just searching directly for the next one. Why? I realize that the speed of this process is completely unimportant, but I would think that it would make the algorithm clearer (and this algorithm desperately needs to be clearer!). I'm willing to make a patch for any and all of these if the consensus is that one is appropriate. -- Jerry James http://www.ittc.ku.edu/~james/