Re: Eglot, project.el, and python virtual environments

[Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru>]

On 23/11/22 01:23, João Távora wrote:
> Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru> writes:
> 
>> On 22/11/22 23:34, João Távora wrote:
>>> Given a tree a tree structure such as a file system that can have
>>> very many nodes, not having any means to take advantage of that structure
>>> tree-ness (as project.el clearly doesn't: see the protocol of
>>> project-files and
>>> the lack of sub-projects) is going to be a hard limitation.  Monorepos
>>> are really popular in many businesses and many of these are large and/or
>>> getting larger.
>>
>> Like I said: if you want sub-projects, go and write a proper feature
>> request, with expected behavior, which commands are affected, which
>> are not.
> 
> I've just described in the other thread that I would like to have
> finding references and finding files to be able to operate on either
> sub-projects or super-projects on demand.  This is the problem I'm
> facing, and it's not new.  For example, there is only: find file in the
> very large project, and find file in the current directory.  There is no
> "find file in this section of the repo, which is a sub-project in
> itself".

It would be much more helpful in a dedicated bug report where we could 
discuss the details, collect the votes and see what kind of design will 
ultimately satisfy the requirements. Instead of drowning it all in this 
thread, which is only moderately related.

> IMO, it's not "improper" to describe problems and use cases: in fact I
> prefer that people describe over jumping to vapourware solutions.  But
> if you're really looking for a suggestion as to _how_ to design it, I
> suppose my problem would be well dealt with a negative prefix on C-x p g
> and C-x p f giving me a choice of which project to operate on.  But that
> is only one possibility: new commands are also acceptable.

Note that you can more-or-less do this now: press 'C-x p p', select the 
parent project from the list, then choose 'f' or 'g' to run the command 
there. So to justify the added complexity one should say that they do 
want to use this feature frequently enough to justify the added 
complexity (which will reduce the number of keystrokes).

And even if we do, we might not need the additional notion of 
sub-projects. E.g. 'search in the parent project (if any)' might work as 
"take the root, go up a directory, search for a project there; if it 
exists, use it". Though Stephen L. might want a generic for that, since 
his projects do not correlate with directory tree.

OTOH, if one of the operations will require a step "get all subprojects 
of the current project", then a separate notion might be required, with 
a separate hook.

> As to how one defines sub-projects, I think having
> project-find-functions be used to compose a list of projects (as opposed
> to to stopping after finding one) would be a nice way.  It would be nice
> if the elements of project-find-functions could be informed of the
> projects found so far.  But keeping the "stop after first" behaviour and
> having members return a more complex object is maybe also good.  I
> really don't care much what you eventually choose, as long as I can
> solve my problem.

If we wanted to define projects and subprojects through the same hook, 
the step "get all subprojects of the current project" might not be 
feasible to implement. Because of performance-related considerations.