So the FreeBSD guys had the same issue but actually bothered to notify upstream so the issue has been fixed: https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=57200 That doesn't mean we shouldn't look into using a non-deprecated function though. Earlier I did try to use 'package-generate-autoloads' as that seems like the ideal function to use but it adds the following string to the loaddefs file: "(add-to-list 'load-path (directory-file-name (or (file-name-directory #$) (car load-path))))" This line would probably work fine but for some reason when I tried it, it didn't properly substitute '#$' with the file name. I'm not really sure how to fix that.