Re: running EDE from a file that is not under a project root dir

[Eric Ludlam]

On 08/04/2015 02:13 PM, Stephen Leake wrote:
> I often have "notes" files that are outside a project directory. For
> example, my Emacs notes are not in the emacs/master directory; it is
> controlled by git, and I don't want to commit my notes to that, nor
> clutter .gitignore.
>
> At the same time, I'd like to be able to invoke "search for symbol at
> point" from the notes text buffer; I have notes on functions/vars I'm
> using at the moment.

...

> My question is this; what is the minimum change I should make to EDE to
> support these use cases?
>
> I think I need three things:
>
> - add a "file patterns" element to the EDE project (or target?) data
> structure, and have semantic-symref-derive-find-filepatterns check that
> before the alists.

I'm not sure what matching file patterns has to do with core project 
functionality.  Your use case sounds like something that would want a 
specialized tool, the same way there are tools that jump between 'doc' 
and 'code'.

For example, if you keep notes in org mode (I assume everyone here uses 
org mode these days) then perhaps what is needed is tooling that knows 
how to keep TODO files in an org file tied to a project and the desired 
language, and then the project would form the root of any symref call.

I suspect symref needs a tweak so that the major mode in question is 
passed along far enough to get into the pattern matcher.  Once that is 
done, a tool that goes from your notes to src could call symref however 
it is needed.

> - add an ede-global-project variable that I can set to my current
> project, to bypass the project root detection.
>
>      I've proposed the same change to project.el; there, it can be used
>      by one of the project-find functions.

I find the global project concept scary.  I can't say how many times 
I've edited Emacs code that was wasn't on my load path because I had 
multiple checkouts of the same code.  Mostly just too many times.

> - some way to set up the EDE project object for elisp, especially the
> file patterns.

I don't think you need to do anything project specific here.  Symref 
doesn't do anything with EDE past getting the root.

>      The EDE info manual in Emacs master mentions ede-proj-elisp.el in
>      section 8 Extending EDE, but I don't see that file in Emacs master
>      git.

That is a piece of the large Make/Automake project system that builds 
makefiles for you.  Symref only uses EDE to identify a starting place 
for the search, or a place to find tooling caches (like GTAGS).  EDE is 
then used by the semantic part that builds up the output buffer by 
parsing tags which needs various include paths depending on language.

Eric