Re: Is it time to create more subdirs in lisp/?

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hi, Deniz.

On Thu, Sep 01, 2011 at 07:44:02AM +0200, Deniz Dogan wrote:
> The lisp/ directory in trunk could use some more subdirectories.

> Examples:


> dired-aux.el
> dired-x.el
> dired.el
> epa-dired.el
> find-dired.el
> image-dired.el

> help-at-pt.el
> help-fns.el
> help-macro.el
> help-mode.el
> help.el

> ps-bdf.el
> ps-def.el
> ps-mule.el
> ps-print.el
> ps-samp.el

I'd say no.  once you start making small directories they're going to
start stacking up in an increasingly tall tree.

I've been in proprietary projects with around 20,000 files in them, all
in directories with ~8-10 files in each.  Visiting a file in such a
hierarchy is a nightmare, as you have to enter, perhaps, 6 successive
directory names to get there.  That's a lot of names to have to navigate
through.

I've been told that small directories are optimal for selecting files
with dialog boxes, but that's not how Emacs works.  I sometimes find it
irritating even to have to go one level down from ../lisp to
../lisp/progmodes.

So my vote is for few large directories rather than many small ones.  I
would go further than Stefan, and say a new directory we create should
have at least 100 files, not 20.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).