Re: Failure to build mew

SY> This sounds good. I'd only need to add (require 'poe) to one SY> .el wouldn't I, like ./mew/mew/mew.el? No, that would depend on what each individual file requires. Just put it in all of them. If Lisp only had functions, we would not need to worry about requires at build time. (We might want to, for error checking etc, but we wouldn't need to.) The problem is macros. A macro gets evaluated twice. The first time, its arguments are treated as literals, and a new sexp is returned. _This sexp is a compile-time constant._ So macros are expanded by the bytecompiler for efficiency. The problem is that the bytecompiler provides _no_ facility for lazy evaluation of macros; when bytecode encounters a call that resolves to a macro, it pukes. So the bytecompiler _must_ have _all_ macros available. (This means that although you can get away with redefining a macro as a function---it will be ignored by compiled code---if you redefine a function as a macro, you can only pray there is no bytecode that calls that function.) So you need to put the require in all .els that call poe.el macros. Some .els may not call any poe.el macros; then you're OK. Other .els may require some that requires poe.el; again you're OK. But you don't really want to bother _checking_, do you? Not to mention that it's hard to know what macros poe.el will define (it only defines its functions conditional on the version of Emacs). Now do you see why I suggested rm -rf libs/apel? :-P -- University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091 _________________ _________________ _________________ _________________ What are those straight lines for? "XEmacs rules."