Re: progmodes/project.el and search paths

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 08/04/2015 04:43 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> I really think we could benefit from presenting some kind of goal or
> vision for the project.el development.

The vision is: identify general pieces of information that a interesting 
Lisp program can use without worrying too much about which kind of a 
project it is, and add them to the API in a way that's both easy to use 
and (hopefully) implement.

Simply identifying pieces of information doesn't help until you have an 
application in mind. Which, at this point, will often imply "intend to 
implement that application yourself". There's no good way to verify 
usefulness of a piece of API aside from creating at least an 
quick-and-dirty, example consumer.

> AFAICS, it started as a way to
> standardize finding a "project root", then moved to finding "project
> directories", but now it seems we are discussing a much wider scope,
> something like infrastructure for project definition and possibly also
> IDEs?

Much of the recent discussion centered on the question of whether EDE is 
good enough. David also questioned whether the scope (of type-agnostic 
project operations) is a wide one.

> If it's the latter, then I won't expect to see arguments about
> "complications outweighing benefits" in reference to features that are
> basic for any IDE that is worth its menus.

It was a quick judgment: David doesn't seem interested on working on 
extracting some general behavior out of it. I'm not captivated either.

In any case, that was either a weak proposal, or a very incomplete one.