My ~/.emacs reads like this:

;;; generate auto-autoloads.el in ~/elisp/dotemacs/
(let ((generated-autoload-file "~/elisp/dotemacs/auto-autoloads.el")
(backup-inhibited t))
(apply 'update-directory-autoloads '("~/elisp/lib/"))
(kill-buffer (file-name-nondirectory generated-autoload-file)))

;;; load dotemacs/*.el (including auto-autoloads.el)
(mapc (lambda (f) (load f))
(split-string
(shell-command-to-string "find ~/elisp/dotemacs -name *.el")))

That's it, essentially.

With this arrangement, library functions I've written that I don't
always want to load at startup, but I do want to have to hand, go in
~/elisp/lib, and customisations (and functions I do always want to load
at startup) go in ~/elisp/dotemacs.

I can put my customisations and functions in as many .el files as I like
within their respective directories, making it much easier to organise
things generally.

Sebastian Tennant wrote:

Quoth rustom gmail.com>:

If you don't care about autoloads (or you're not sure what they are) and
you just want a small ~/.emacs, then all you need is this:

;;; load dotemacs/*.el
(mapc (lambda (f) (load f))
(split-string
(shell-command-to-string "find ~/elisp/dotemacs -name *.el")))

This routine simply loads each file ending '.el' found under the
directory ~/elisp/dotemacs.

Sebastian

On Nov 8, 6:08 pm, Sebastian Tennant smolny.plus.com> wrote:

Quoth rustom gmail.com>:

First of all, autoloads exist precisely for the reason you've stated;
avoiding needless loading of functions at startup. Consider the
function 'foo' defined in bar.el. If your ~/.emacs includes the line

(autoload 'foo "bar.el" "My function foo" t)

Thanks Sebastian for a detailed response. But I cant see how it will
work. Let me try and collect the pieces of the jigsaw as I understand
them.
Firstly the organization

On Nov 9, 7:18 pm, Sebastian Tennant smolny.plus.com> wrote:

Second the scales:
Lets assume that elisp/lib contains thousands of lines of lisp
distilled into say about 10 autoloads and a few customizations. In
general the user is never expected to use the 10 autoloads together.

Now the call: (apply 'update-directory-autoloads '("~/elisp/lib"))
or (update-directory-autoloads "~/elisp/lib")
will traverse the whole lib file-set -- all the thousands of lines --
at startup losing the advantage of autoloading.

For using an elisp module let us say foo I guess we need the following
three phases:

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 11:53:08 -0800, rustom wrote:

I use the following .emacs:

ELPA works this way, more or less. It isn't as simple as "drop in
some elisp and work", since it provides some other features that
require a bit more metadata. But, the basic idea is the same: extract
autoloads and byte-compile at package install time; and read the
minimal number of files and only evaluate autoloads at package
evaluation time.

For more info:

http://tromey.com/elpa/

There are some other, more minimal, elisp install packages. They are
listed on the wiki.

Tom

After my last post I I looked at my current .emacs file and realised
its more difficult than I thought:

Ideally if the separate aspects of the setup I want were independent
they could be put into separate directories and the corresponding
loaddefs and customizations loaded in any (non-deterministic) order.

However there are dependencies: eg to use python (with refactoring)
one needs bicyclerepairman; to use brm one needs pymacs.

What is worse there are emacs bugs whose correction needs careful
sequencing:
For example I need to put
(provide 'sb-info)
just before the brm-init otherwise I get 'recursive require' errors.
What in the name of ... is sb-info -- thats another OT matter

rustom gmail.com> writes:

The common way to get around this is to number your files -
e.g. 50my-lib.el 60my-other-lib.el etc. This forces files to be loaded in a
specific order.