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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 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.