Re: living documentation - list packages in core

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Sławomir Grochowski <slawomir.grochowski@gmail.com>
> Date: Sat, 02 Mar 2024 22:10:12 +0100
> 
> In the Emacs codebase, there are numerous packages with overlaps and
> interactions that I don’t fully understand. Therefore, I have generated
> a table listing all packages along with their functionalities to
> provide an overall view.
> 
> Information extracted from each file includes:
> 
> 1. Name of the file/package
> 2. Year of creation - determined from the first date in the line ';; Copyright (C)'
> 3. Autoload - indicates whether the package is preloaded. Note that some packages are preloaded without autoload, for example, abbrev.el
> 4. Keywords - extracted from the line ';; Keywords:'
> 5. Description - taken from the first line, e.g., ';;; ibuffer.el --- operate on buffers like dired'

We have finder.el which does this job (it doesn't extract the year and
the preloaded parts, but this is either not very important IMO or
available by other means).  The only difference is that finder.el is
by default run only when Emacs is built, so the data is static once
Emacs is installed.  But then core packages are seldom modified
without rebuilding Emacs, so for those packages doing it as part of
the build seems justified.  You can see the result of running
finder.el in the file finder-inf.el which is present in any built
Emacs tree.

Maybe we could extend finder.el to provide additional information and
to scan more directories, so that, for example, it covers installed
packages in ~/.emacs.d/ etc.  I think this is a better way forward
than inventing a completely new facility for what seems like a very
similar purpose.

Thanks.