RE: Generic dispatcher

[Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com>]

> For epa/eww/mhe/... I think we should introduce a generic dispatcher.
> The way I see it, it would look like:
> 
> - M-x mail RET runs one of the mail backends.  First time around it
>   prompts the user to choose a MUA, then stores the result in a Custom
>   var and doesn't prompt any more.  This would rely on
>   a mail-alternatives variable holding various MUAs such as Gnus, MH-E,
>   ... and third party packages can easily register themselves in this
>   list via their autoloads.  The user can reconsider his choice with C-u
>   M-x mail RET in which case she gets prompted again.
> 
> - same for M-x irc RET
> - same for M-x encrypt RET
> - same for M-x browse RET
> - we could push this further (e.g. auctex vs tex-mode.el) but I'm not
>   sure it'd be such a great idea.

+1

1. Assuming all of the commands under the same dispatcher do very
similar things.  And assuming a user really wants to use multiple such,
rather than just have a preferred single such (e.g., via customize).

2. As "browsing" can apply (whether this comes to mind or not) to other
things besides the web (e.g. repositories, hierarchies, and graphs of
all sorts), consider naming your `browse' dispatcher more specifically:
`browse-web' or some such.

The alternative would be to have all such diverse kinds of
browsing/navigating on the same dispatch command, but I think that
would defeat the purpose.

More generally, I'd suggest keeping this sort of thing for tight
groups of closely related commands, not for wide categories of commands.