Re: progmodes/project.el and search paths

[Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@stephe-leake.org>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> Cc: deng@randomsample.de, eric@siege-engine.com, emacs-devel@gnu.org
>> From: Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru>
>> Date: Tue, 4 Aug 2015 23:15:16 +0300
>> 
>> > E.g., there are a couple of standard ways to specify in a Makefile the
>> > directories where the project's files live.  Other significant parts
>> > of a project's information in a Makefile are recipes to build the
>> > project, to install/uninstall it, to clean the tree, etc.  Also,
>> > various standard commands, like compilation command, link command, a
>> > command that creates a library and a manual, etc.
>> >
>> > These are all clear candidates for "project information an interested
>> > Lisp program would like to extract", no?
>> 
>> I can't easily answer that. What's the use for "command that creates a 
>> manual" (even setting aside the fact that not all projects have that)? 
>> Calling it in M-x project-create-manual, a command that only does that 
>> one thing?
>
> Yes, for starters.  Building the whole project from scratch, including
> the manuals, is another.  Finding out whether the project _has_ a
> manual building instructions is yet another.
>
>> Not very interesting, IMHO.
>
> I don't understand this criterion.  I think the criterion should be
> "is this useful".

Apparently EDE has the notion of "targets" for this sort of thing. So
the EDE users find it useful, for actually running the targets.

The question for project.el is whether is would be useful for _other_
(non-EDE) elisp programs; we already have EDE to create and run the
targets.

I can imagine a full-blown Configuration Management application (think
IBM ClearCase) that manages the created binaries as well as the sources;
it would want a list of the targets of a project, to ensure they were
tracked in the CM database. But such a thing would probably not be
written on top of project.el; it would be more like a new EDE project
type, or a complete replacement for EDE.

Short of that, I can't think of a non-EDE elisp program that would want
to know about targets. There might be one someday; we can extend
project.el then.

There are probably other features in EDE that some non-EDE programs
would want to know about; I'm still learning about EDE.

-- 
-- Stephe