[XEmacs] auto-loading fails for time-to-seconds

[Marcus Harnisch]

Hi all

Recently I decided to retire the outdated Gnus package in XEmacs and
give a brand new Gnus fresh from the Git repo a try. Works fine so
far. And it is *much* faster with my Lotus Notes server @work. I'd go as
far as saying that searching for messages with nnir and the IMAP search
command is faster than native search with the Notes client for some
reason. However, I keep getting this annoying message:

itimer "run-at-time<2>" signaled: (invalid-state "Autoloading failed to define 
function" time-to-seconds)

Which was easy enough to track down to corresponding definitions in
gnus-util.el and time-date.el that test for availability of
#'float-time. I don't quite understand why the autoload magic doesn't
work.[1]

But what I really don't understand is why #'float-time is required to be
a built-in function. In recent XEmacs float-time is defined in subr.el
which fails the test (subrp 'float-time).

Thanks
Marcus


Footnotes: 
[1]  In fact I don't even get how it is supposed to work.