Jan Vroonhof <vroonhof(a)math.ethz.ch&gt; writes in xemacs-beta(a)xemacs.org: What do you consider fair use of autoloads and what do you consider misuse? I don't have strong opinions either way on this. One could argue that autoloads are only for the user, ie. for convenience in building a .emacs and having M-x some-unloaded-function Do The Right Thing. On the other hand, I would guess that there is a fair amount of legacy code that doesn't do explicit requires when it needs external symbols. I have a strong preference for *not* putting requires at the toplevel when only defuns are involved as they aren't strictly needed for bytecompilation and only slow things down. I *have* a strong preference for using explicit requires rather than hiding the dependencies in a bytecompilation lisp package like W3 and Gnus do. In my view of the world, one should be able to hand bytecompile xemacs -batch -f batch-byte-compile some-file.el any lisp file in the searched load-path and have it work. Currently it does not. We ought to make this a project for the (very) near future. I've already done it with everything we have direct control over in xemacs-base, xemacs-devel, etc.