Re: build failure with net-utils

Ville> Yep, of course they're not. But listing all requirements, Ville> direct and indirect/recursive, just shouldn't happen IMO. Ville> When time passes and some of the package X's directly Ville> required packages' requirements change, it will either lead Ville> to missing/extra REQUIRES stuff in package X, or to Ville> maintenance hell. Er, no. That is not maintenance hell. _This_ is: ;; Here's a neat function. +;; I think so, too, and it's really the only entry point. +;; So let's autoload it and get rid of some #'requires... +;;;###autoload (defun really-neat-function () ; ... Charles Waldman did some work on generating a graph of dependencies. You might search the archives (late 1999?). However, he did it in Python, and this really should be done in Emacs Lisp (see below). I think that all the necessary information is in the Makefile and auto-autoloads.el ... oops, no, you do have to grep out all the #'requires (Makefile REQUIRES is currently unreliable because human-generated). I think a two-pass algorithm which first goes through all the files and greps out all autoloaded symbols (watch out for eval-when constructs and the like; defuns and defvars will not necessarily be at top level), then checks for dependencies, is sufficient. Pass 2 should be done by the byte compiler (hook in to the places where we check for whether a variable is defined/used). Pass 1 should result in an auxiliary hashtable of symbols which says what they are and where they are defined. Probably this can be done by `batch-update-autoloads' et al. Ville> Splitting packages into smaller chunks should help with Ville> this too. I think it actually hurts, by increasing the number of possible (and actual) transitive dependencies. -- Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN My nostalgia for Icon makes me forget about any of the bad things. I don't have much nostalgia for Perl, so its faults I remember. Scott Gilbert c.l.py