Re: Guile in Emacs

[Jeff Clough]

<address@hidden> writes:

> Jeff> It is also important for that information to be available in one place.
>
> I agree that Emacs should come with all relevant documentation bundled
> up as part of the package, but I can not see that this is the same as
> everything necessarily has to sit inside (the moral equivalent of) one
> single gigantic texinfo file.

Neither do I, but what we have today works.  That's what I'm for.  Don't
fix what isn't broken.  Or, more appropriately, don't fix what Emacs
seems to be the only application to do *right*.

For Emacs itself, there are exactly four places, organized by context,
someone has to look to find the information they need.

1.  The Emacs Manual - How to use Emacs as an editor.  The only Lisp
found here is for basic, simple configuration.  This is for people that
don't want to learn Lisp, they just want to use Emacs as an editor, run
macros, dired, etc.

2.  The Emacs Lisp Intro - Teaches the basics of Emacs Lisp.  How to use
defadvice, creating a simple major mode, etc.  This is for people just
getting started, or who want to know only how to write a simple function
to accomplish some task this afternoon.

3.  The Emacs Lisp Reference - Describes every function, macro and
language construct with a few explainations.  There may be more
information to be had about a particular thing, but it at least lists
all things with *some* amount of description.  This is for people
seriously interested in the language who want to browse for
ideas/knowledge, read something away from their computer or copy a quick
"toy" example (if available) and make it work for them right now.

4.  The online documentation/what you get from describe-function and
it's kin - The definitive reference to every symbol you can throw at
Emacs.  Assumed to be up-to-date and accurate.  This is for people
knee-deep in code right now that can't remember what the third argument
of the function at point needs to be, or can't remember if what they
want is insert-file-contents or insert-file-contents-literally.

All four of these sources have their proper use, and none of them could
be used to duplicate exactly the purpose of any other.  And it covers
all of the contexts you'd want documentation (IMHO) well, in a minimum
number of places.

> There will need to be easy acces to the reference just as we get today
> easily can get from the documentation of a function to its source
> definition and there should probably be some top-level entry points with
> proper reading guidance just as the editing library manual should of
> course link to the language manual where relevant.

I think having cross references between the four sources described above
is a great thing.  There should be more of that today.

Jeff