bug#74382: `compile-first` Make rule is no longer using `load-prefer-newer`

[Konstantin Kharlamov]

On Mon, 2024-11-18 at 05:06 +0100, Gerd Möllmann wrote:
> Konstantin Kharlamov <Hi-Angel@yandex.ru> writes:
> 
> > Even Gerd in this discussion forgot about this peculiarity — and
> > Gerd unlike me is a regular Emacs developer.
> 
> Even worse, even worse: He wrote that stuff! But I think I'll excuse
> him
> because that was 25 years ago, and he took a 20 year break from
> Emacs,
> after stepping down, and he's old of course :-).
> 
> Seriously, maybe knowing a bit of history helps understand the
> current
> situation wrt .elc files? One wouldn't believe it nowadays, but they
> were originally in version control, i.e. RCS, and later CVS. I didn't
> want that in the public CVS repo we set up for Emacs 21, so I added
> the
> ability to bootstrap and removed the .elc files from CVS.
> COMPILE_FIRST
> and so on are part of the bootstrapping support.
> 
> Rewriting the build system to follow some standard (if it existed
> back
> then, which I don't remember), was not important to me. There were so
> many other things to do.

Haha, well, everything gets improved iteratively, so that's okay 😊