Re: xref and leaving "temporary" buffers open

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru>
> Date: Sat, 25 Jul 2015 18:09:33 +0300
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> > My vote is for the default that keeps the buffers.  I see nothing
> > wrong with having a lot of buffers in an Emacs session.  Personally, I
> > regularly walk through all my buffers and kill those I no longer need,
> > because I use desktop.el to restore my sessions, which would otherwise
> > grow indefinitely.  It's no big deal.  It is much less of a big deal
> > if sessions are not restored.
> 
> That's what I'm also inclining towards now. However, the list of buffers 
> automatically opened by xref might be too big for you (or me) to clean 
> up manually (if you search for occurrences of some common word, for 
> example). After that, I'm not sure what a user might do to undo that. 
> (mapc #'kill-buffer (buffer-list)) might be the only option.

Then perhaps there should be a command to kill all those buffers
created by xref for these purposes.

OTOH, look at the example of info.el's info-apropos: it doesn't keep
around the Info manuals it visits.  So this is also a reasonable
behavior we have elsewhere.

> We can't really support *every* preference. And some of them can even be 
> incompatible with architectural decisions providing best tradeoffs.
> 
> IMO, it's better to decide on the default workflow that we believe to be 
> useful to most, and only after that add variations to that behavior.

If you can identify that now, fine.  If not, there's nothing wrong
with changing the default later, as long as non-default behavior is
available as an option.

> Ideally, we might even find a solution that satisfies the needs of both 
> kinds of users, which would otherwise ask for different behaviors, 
> tailored for their needs.

Again, if that can be identified, fine.  But if not, having several
optional behaviors is the Emacs'y way of not forcing users into
Procrustean situations.