Command line parsing is buggy [was: -no-autoloads broken ...]

Gunnar> Wouldn't it be easier to move the command line parsing for Gunnar> the relvant variable after the loading of the dump file? Gunnar> This would be more like the initialisation in a Gunnar> traditional dumped xemacs. Now that I've looked more carefully at the code, I agree. However, doing this right is something I don't have time to do right now. Any takers? A light audit of the command line parsing code reveals the following apparent bugs and issues: 1. There is a comment in startup.el indicating that some unidentified hacker would like to move as much command line parsing as possible out of C and into Lisp. I agree; among other things, it would obviate all pdump issues with command args. The command args that absolutely can't be moved into Lisp right away: -nd, -sd, -batch, -d, -t, -nw: Used in emacs.c. I suspect that with some effort -d and -nw could be moved into Lisp, but I doubt it's trivial. As far as I can tell, all the rest could be moved into Lisp by creating a `really_very_early_command_line' function to be called from `normal-top-level' rather than from `command-line'. But I haven't checked terribly carefully. 2. The presence of -NXhost or -MachLaunch in the command line will hose processing of all lower-priority args parsed in C. 3. Some C-parsed args have the same priority; if they come in the wrong order in the command-line, the earlier one will be ignored, as will all lower priority C-parsed args. This applies to repetition of C-parsed args as well. (Any parsing done in Lisp should not be affected.) 4. -debug-paths appears twice in the standard_args table in emacs.c with different priorities, and is parsed twice in main_1 with different semantics. 5. I haven't checked carefully, but I think that some options are ordered differently in standard_args priority and in main_1. There are probably more. -- 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."