custom-load.el and MH-E compatibility macros

Another chapter in the continuing saga of producing an XEmacs package with MH-E 8... :-) When I try to build MH-E 8, I get a custom-load.el that looks like this: ;;; custom-load.el --- automatically extracted custom dependencies ;;; Code: (autoload 'custom-add-loads "cus-load") ;;; custom-load.el ends here Notice the lack of calls to custom-add-loads. I was able to generate a reasonable-looking custom-loads.el by visiting <my_workspace>/xemacs-packages/mh-e and doing M-x Custom-make-dependencies RET lisp RET from my currently running XEmacs process, which of course already has MH-E loaded. Looking at the MH-E 8 source, I see that it doesn't invoke defcustom, defface, or defgroup directly. Instead, it defines deffoo-mh wrapper macros and invokes *them*. Custom-make-dependencies-1 looks for sexp's that start with "defcustom", "defface", or "defgroup". The regexp looks like it would find invocations of defcustom-mh and friends (line numbers are for lib/xemacs-21.4.19/lisp/cus-dep.el): 121 (while (re-search-forward 122 "^(defcustom\\|^(defface\\|^(defgroup" 123 nil t) But consider what it does when it has found a likely match: 124 (beginning-of-line) 125 (let ((expr (read (current-buffer)))) 126 ;; We need to ignore errors here, so that 127 ;; defcustoms with :set don't bug out. Of 128 ;; course, their values will not be assigned in 129 ;; case of errors, but their `custom-group' 130 ;; properties will by that time be in place, and 131 ;; that's all we care about. 132 (ignore-errors 133 (eval expr)) We'll get the right results if defcustom-mh et al are already defined, but nothing if they're not defined. I'm not sure how to proceed. I'd rather not replace the deffoo-mh invocations with direct calls to deffoo, since that approach seems unlikely to work for upstream. I thought about moving the deffoo-mh definitions to their own file, and modifying the build rules to load the macros before invoking Custom-make-dependencies. For example, if I define a new makefile macro called CUSTOM_LOAD_PREMAKE, it could be null for most packages, but something like "-l mh-macros" for MH-E. Then the build rule for custom-load.el could look like $(AUTOLOAD_PATH)/custom-load.el: $(GENERATED_ELC_DEPENDENCIES) $(XEMACS_BATCH_CLEAN) $(LOAD_AUTOLOADS) -l cus-dep \ $(CUSTOM_LOAD_PREMAKE) \ -f Custom-make-dependencies $(AUTOLOAD_PATH) ＠touch $(AUTOLOAD_PATH)/custom-load.el ＠rm -f $(AUTOLOAD_PATH)/custom-load.el~ Comments? Suggestions? thanks, mike _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://calypso.tux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta