11.1 Emacs Lisp

Automake provides some support for Emacs Lisp. The `LISP' primary is used to hold a list of `.el' files. Possible prefixes for this primary are `lisp_' and `noinst_'. Note that if lisp_LISP is defined, then `configure.in' must run AM_PATH_LISPDIR (see section 5.4 Autoconf macros supplied with Automake).

By default Automake will byte-compile all Emacs Lisp source files using the Emacs found by AM_PATH_LISPDIR. If you wish to avoid byte-compiling, simply define the variable ELCFILES to be empty. Byte-compiled Emacs Lisp files are not portable among all versions of Emacs, so it makes sense to turn this off if you expect sites to have more than one version of Emacs installed. Furthermore, many packages don't actually benefit from byte-compilation. Still, we recommend that you leave it enabled by default. It is probably better for sites with strange setups to cope for themselves than to make the installation less nice for everybody else.