Re: progmodes/project.el and search paths

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 08/04/2015 12:40 PM, Stephen Leake wrote:

> It would help if the header comment in project.el said something along
> those lines.
>
> There is a big difference between:
>
> "provide an interface between projects and the rest of Emacs"
>
> and
>
> "provide a core API for implementing projects".
>
> The current project.el header is unclear as to which it is intended to
> be.

Would adding this help?

diff --git a/lisp/progmodes/project.el b/lisp/progmodes/project.el
index d849f93..16578f1 100644
--- a/lisp/progmodes/project.el
+++ b/lisp/progmodes/project.el
@@ -22,6 +22,10 @@
 ;; This file contains generic infrastructure for dealing with
 ;; projects, and a number of public functions: finding the current
 ;; root, related project directories, search path, etc.
+;;
+;; The goal is to make it easy for Lisp programs to operate on the
+;; current project, without having to know which package handles
+;; detection of that project type, parsing its config files, etc.

 ;;; Code:

> If it's really the former, that puts a much different light on things;
> it should be providing wrappers/adaptors for EDE, projectile, etc, so
> grep, compile etc can use project information.

"Should" is a strong word. There's wrapper for EDE living in 
lisp/cedet/ede.el already. Projectile "should" include its own wrapper 
as well.

> In particular, there should be no "xref-find-regexp"; instead, "grep"
> and similar commands should be enhanced to optionally use project
> functions to get the search path.

xref-find-regexp can still be useful: it'll search a user-specified 
directory and present the results using the xref interface.

At the moment, xref-find-regexp offers both types of searches. To search 
in an arbitrary directory, you preface it with C-u.