Re: Difficulties with elpa repository.

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hello, Stefan.

I've found the problem.  (Well, the first problem, anyway.  ;-)

On Thu, Nov 26, 2015 at 10:32:54AM -0500, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> > OK.  I call make with

> >     PATH=~/path/to/emacs-25/src:$PATH make -k

> > , and I've inserted a "-Q" into the definition of EMACS in GNUMakefile.

> Welcome to "make"!  Instead of the above, you could just do

>       make -k EMACS="~/path/to/emacs-25/src/emacs -Q"

> > But I get a near infinite number of errors like:
> >     Error loading autoloads: (file-error Cannot open load file No such
> >     file or directory tex-site)

> Hmm... the way things normally work is as follows:

> - GNUmakefile ensures that all packages have a "<pkg>-autoloads.el" file.

Here, make used my (pretty old) installed Emacs version, this being
before I'd learnt to specify the emacs executable to make.  The
<pkg>-autoloads.el files generated were lacking the "(add-to-list
'load-path ...)" form.

So I'll delete all these <pkg>-autoloads.el's and get Emacs to
regenerate them with Emacs 25.

Then it will work.  ;-)

Maybe some sort of version number in the <pkg>-autoloads.el's might help
avoid this sort of blunder.

> - The "%.elc: %.el" rule of GNUmakefile runs Emacs, setting up
>   package-user-dir as being the "../elpa/packages" directory, then calls
>   package-initialize which should "activate" all package in there.
> - activation of auctex is done by loading packages/auctex/auctex-autoloads.el.
> - packages/auctex/auctex-autoloads.el begins by adding .../packages/auctex
>   to `load-path'.
> - a bit later, packages/auctex/auctex-autoloads.el does "(require 'tex-site)".
> - this require succeeds because of the previous addition to load-path.

> So my best guess is that for some reason .../packages/auctex was not
> added to load-path by .../packages/auctex/auctex-autoloads.el.
> Can you check the contents of .../packages/auctex/auctex-autoloads.el?
> It should start with

Yes, that was it.

>    ;;; auctex-autoloads.el --- automatically extracted autoloads
>    ;;
>    ;;; Code:
>    (add-to-list 'load-path (or (file-name-directory #$) (car load-path)))

> > , always complaining about the one file tex-site.  tex-site.el is in the
> > auctex package.  Have you any notion as to why so many files are trying
> > to load tex-site.el/c, and why they're not finding it?

> Every file is compiled by a separate Emacs process, which always starts
> by doing package-initialize, which will load tex-site.


>         Stefan

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).