Re: progmodes/project.el and search paths

[João Távora]

On Tue, Aug 4, 2015 at 8:23 PM, Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote:
>> On 08/04/2015 09:16 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> E.g., there are a couple of standard ways to specify in a Makefile the
> directories where the project's files live.  Other significant parts
> of a project's information in a Makefile are recipes to build the
> project, to install/uninstall it, to clean the tree, etc.  Also,
> various standard commands, like compilation command, link command, a
> command that creates a library and a manual, etc.
>
> These are all clear candidates for "project information an interested
> Lisp program would like to extract", no?

If I may go out on possibly a very long limb here, and answering
your specific question my understanding of project.el is that it helps in
writing a "project implementation backend". It is that backend that
understands Makefiles and supplies these bits of information, via
project.el's API to interested Lisp programs, like xref, perhaps
"M-x compile" or some other project-wide command.

I'd welcome that, provided it becomes popular enough that some useful
backends actually do get written.

But I may be misreading the whole discussion, it's indeed become a
bit confusing.

-- 
João Távora