Re: ELPA -- making individual packages

[Eric Abrahamsen]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

>> I just realized to my horror that my Gnorb package in ELPA barfs up
>> several screenfuls of warnings when it compiles. I'd like to fix those
>> warnings by compiling it with a clean batch Emacs, using the GNUmakefile
>> in the git repo, but my only option is to make *all* the packages at
>> once, and that fails almost immediately on cpio-mode.
>
> [ Hmm... cpio-mode seems to build fine for me (with a crapload of
>   warnings, tho).  Can you send me the error log so I can try and
>   fix it?  ]

Dunno what's going on here, I tried once (first make externals, then
make) and it gave me:

  INFO     Scraping files for counsel-autoloads.el...done
  INFO     Scraping files for cpio-mode-autoloads.el...
cpio-newc-test.el:0:0: error: scan-error: (Unbalanced parentheses 2556 2702)
make: *** [GNUmakefile:141: packages/cpio-mode/cpio-mode-autoloads.el] Error 255

I just pulled again, and did the same thing over, and now it gave me:

Generating description file packages/sml-mode/sml-mode-pkg.el
Generating description file packages/sql-beeline/sql-beeline-pkg.el
Search failed: ";;; sql-beeline.el ends here"
make: *** [GNUmakefile:194: packages/sql-beeline/sql-beeline-pkg.el] Error 255

I assume I'm just doing something wrong in the build process.

>> Can "make" do catchall targets, where for instance I could say "make
>> gnorb" and make would check that "gnorb" isn't an existing target, and
>> the catchall target would say "if the directory "packages/gnorb" exists
>> then compile that, otherwise bail"?
>
> I don't think `make` can do exactly that, but there's no doubt that we
> should be able to provide a way to build just a particular package
> (maybe the target would have to be called something else than just
> `gnorb`, e.g. `compile-gnorb`).  It's probably not that hard.

I'd be happy to help, but "make" is one of those things I wish I had
learned years ago so I already knew it, and didn't have to learn it.
But with some pointers I might be able to figure it out.

Eric