Re: Towards a cleaner build: other output

[Stefan Monnier]

> There's one point I'd argue for more messaging than we have today.  Or
> at least different messaging:
>
>   GEN      loaddefs.el
> Not registering prefix "lo" from completion.  Affects:
> ("locate-completion-entry" "locate-completion-entry-retry"
> "locate-completion-db-error" "load-completions-from-file")
> Not registering prefix "*" from ielm.  Affects: ("*" "**" "***" "*1" "*2" 
> "*3")
> (etc)
>
> When we come to this point in the build process, even on my fastest
> machine, it pauses for many seconds.  I'm not sure that the "not
> registering" thing is useful, but it'd be nice if it gave more feedback
> to let us know that it was working on something and not having choked...

This is the step that builds the loaddefs.el file (i.e. all the
autoloads).  It also happens to build the "prefix" table used to try and
automatically know where to find which definitions, but that's
a side-gig.  So the processing doesn't have anything to do with
"completions", really (in the above warnings "completion" refers to the
completion.el package).

So, yes, you can output some progress messages if you want (it only
takes a long time during bootstrap.  On rebuilds it's usually very
fast), but makes it says something about "scraped autoloads from
N files" or something like that.

> I don't see much value in the "Not registering" messages, because I
> don't see how any developer would respond to the output, but I may be
> totally wrong here.

Those "not registering" mean that the corresponding definitions will not
be findable via things like `C-h o` until the package is loaded.  As for
what the developer should do: cleanup his namespace!


        Stefan