Re: Project systems (again)

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Thu, 17 Apr 2014 14:52:44 -0700
> From: Daniel Colascione <dancol@dancol.org>
> 
> I'd like to include a good, minimal "project system" in Emacs 24.5 and
> turn it on by default.

IMO, this would be a very good progress, thanks.

> EDE already provides some of the functionality I've described above, but
> I don't like the way it does it. It's very complicated and embeds
> uncommon features into the core. EDE's reliance on EIEIO and its large
> feature-set create difficulties dumping the system with Emacs. And have
> you tried actually creating a new EDE project type? It's surprisingly
> and disappointingly difficult. Ad-hoc extensibility with EDE is hard
> because of its EIEIO use, and I don't think EIEIO is buying us anything,
> really.
> 
> EDE also includes many features that are not generally useful (like
> makefile generation) and that complicate the codebase. EDE being
> developed out-of-tree makes it hard to fix these issues. I'd rather have
> a minimal and more idiomatically Emacs-ish core facility that EDE can
> build on. EDE is also not currently integrated with VC, and it doesn't
> provide nice user interfaces (ede-find-file, for example, doesn't do
> completion.)

FWIW, I'd prefer that you work with EDE developers to improve and
extend what they have; starting from scratch (or almost from scratch)
sounds like waste of effort, especially since some of the EDE is
already in Emacs.  I find the Makefile generation feature useful
(e.g., when you need to develop on one platform, then build the same
code and run it on another, where the full development environment is
not necessarily installed).  In any case, I don't see how unused
features could get in your way too much, unless their design is wrong.