What to byte-compile in ..emacs/lisp?

[Bill Wohler]

folks,

in version 17 GNU emacs we've seen the line in loadup.el:

(load "version.el") ;Don't get confused if someone compiled version by mistake

this is obvious because version.el gets modified during each
compile. but what about the files paths.el and loaddefs.el? why
would loading the compiled versions of these files be hazardous?

i just got version 18.26 and have found that several files did not
come byte-compiled and haven't figured out why they might not be.
they are: add-log.el, emacsbug.el, gosmacs.el, inc-vers.el, ledit.el,
mailpost.el, novice.el, tex-start.el, unused.el, and vmsproc.el. is
this an oversight? can i go ahead and byte-compile them?

by the way, i keep my emacs sources in /usr/src/local and copy over
the necessary stuff for running emacs to /usr/local/lib. to conserve
on disk space, i only copy the .elc files. so far it hasn't caused
any problems in version 17. can anyone think of any problems with
this that i might not have encountered yet? of course, i copy the .el
files for those files that do not have .elc equivalents.

thanks for any answers. i'll post a summary if enough responses
come in.

--bw