Re: Gud lord!

[Stefan Monnier]

> > I looked for Emacs support on the Arch Wiki but couldn't find any
> > discussion of it: neither yours nor Landry's.
> > Can't someone add links for them (I still have no idea where to
> > find those two beasts) ?
> The arch Wiki is pretty badly organized (well, it's a Wiki after all!),

Organization is not the problem, since I used `search' anyway :-(

> but I found an emacs mode in the web-browsable ArX source tree:
>    http://superbeast.ucsd.edu/~landry/ArX/ArX-1.0pre8/tools/emacs/

Thanks.

> It looks slightly odd in that it consists of about a zillion files, each
> containing a single elisp function,

Yes, it's a real nightmare to browse.
We really need some mode that shows a whole directory in a single buffer,
in an outline-like mode.

> and it appears to be a standalone
> minor mode rather than a vc.el backend (I wonder, is this because arch
> can't be fit into the vc.el model, or because the author simply didn't
> make the effort?).

The fact that the old VC is basically non-extensible and that the
new is not available under XEmacs and that people think "VC is for
RCS" is often the reason.  Even in the vc-svn.el that comes with Subversion,
there are comments in the file about how VC's model doesn't fit Subversion
and blablabla, but nowhere in the code did they need to go through hoops:
it's all very straightforward.  It might not provide the kind of functionality
that Subversion users want, but that's a separate concern.


        Stefan