Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 426325
Compressed emacs elisp files break emacs conventions and certain emacs functions
Last modified: 2008-01-15 14:16:08 EST
Description of problem: For some reason the elisp files in emacs-el are now all stored compresses. This breaks functions such as find-file (which itself is part of emacs-el) and in general makes it a lot harder to use. More generally, having compressed and less accessible source kind of goes against the whole extensible philosophy of emacs. The other fedora elisp packages (e.g., bbdb-el, vm-el) do not store their elisp function compressed. I can't believe that in this day of true code bloat that we need to scrimp so much on emacs lisp packages (which are optional installs anyway). After all, I started using emacs back in the early 1980's when disk space was almost 100,000 times more expensive per byte.
FWIW -- this is an upstream decision. Also, find-file and find-function are smart enough to auto-uncompress the .el.gz when opening it. Does this not work for you?
I think the problem was that I didn't have auto-compression-mode set correctly. At some point the default changed and I was just toggling it in my .emacs file rather than doing (auto-compression-mode 1) to make sure it is on no matter what. So, fixing that solved my problems and I will bow to the upstream decision...