Re: A project-files implementation for Git projects

[Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru>]

On 17.09.2019 15:03, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

>> 'find' can handle an arbitrary list of ignores, including whitelisting
>> entries (a feature which I've yet to add, but still).
> 
> So you are going to convert the likes of .gitignore to a long list of
> 'find's -name arguments?  Instead of just using the tools that can do
> this at a flip of a command-line argument?  Why?

First of all, it's already done and working.

Second, like I said, using Git for this purpose seems easy enough. 
Others, less so.

> That's a separate topic, IMO, but IME (which is admittedly thin) any
> "project" kind of feature requires the user to register the files
> somehow, before the file appears in the tree shown by the project's
> UI.

Not in my experience.

It's not intuitive that a user has to vc-register a file before it shows 
up in 'project-find-file'. At the very least, we'll have confused users, 
and I'm not sure explaining it all in the manual is the answer.

Second, I'd prefer it to keep working like it already does.

> That's not exactly what Tassilo said, and "bzr help ls" is just a few
> keystrokes away of each one of us.

I didn't have it installed, but OK.

 From what I see, it doesn't allow to "unignore" certain files 
selectively, and I'm not sure if there's a way to apply additional 
ignores except by doing it in Lisp.

>> And the filenotify-based cache would do one job.
> 
> IME, filenotify doesn't scale well, so I won't recommend it for
> non-toy projects in this context.

Even if we just listen to "create", "rename" and "delete" events?

Too bad. I imagine it has more to do with maturity of the package, then, 
so maybe someday.

> I think you are wrong here.  It is 'find' that needs to be coerced to
> do a job that is not really its prime, and a project's view is in most
> cases almost exactly that of the VCS used for the project.

It's a job we've been using 'find' for for decades, and I only had to 
adapt some existing code.

> The
> difference is just-now added files that were not yet registered, and
> how many of these can there be?

That's not the only problem. We want to change the ignores list 
arbitrarily, or maybe just use a user-defined one. It will usually 
correlate with the contents of gitignore/hgignore/bzrignore, but not 
exactly. And neither Hg or Bzr seem to offer easy ways to adjust their 
lists of ignores before output.