Re: Suppressing native compilation (short and long term)

[David Bremner]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>
> This is what I'm asking about: what exactly triggers the compilation?
> Just installing a package shouldn't do that, only loading it into
> Emacs should.

When I talk about "package installation" I mean installing a Debian
binary package. This is a more general notion than a package as defined
by package.el

We have one copy of the .elc files for all users. Because of this, and
the cleanup issue I mentioned above, the elc files need to generated
either at (Debian) package build time, or at (Debian) package
installation time.

> The other part of what I asked is that if for some reason installation
> does need to compile files (something that I still need to understand
> why it happens), there's nothing that hard-codes HOME in the directory
> list used for that.  You can set native-comp-eln-load-path to anything
> you want, and only the directories in that list will be used.

Does that restrict where eln files are written? Or just where emacs
tries to read?

> Emacs doesn't require a writable HOME, it requires a writable
> directory to store *.eln files.  It doesn't have to be HOME.

Fair enough. I tried setting native-compile-target-directory, but that
seemed to be ignored by the trampoline stuff. Maybe both variables need
to be set.

> And once again, I still don't understand why *.eln files are produced
> at installation time in the first place.

The short version is that we need to run emacs at Debian package build
and install time. Byte-compilation is one reason. Running tests at build
time is another.