Re: A unified project root interface

[David Engster <deng@randomsample.de>]

Eric M. Ludlam writes:
> On 03/13/2013 02:03 PM, David Engster wrote:
>> There's no doubt that EDE can do all what's needed, but is has to be
>> wrapped in something that's easier to use, at least for simple stuff
>> like what project-roots.el does.
>
> Ok, I can buy that.  EDE was never simple.  I just know that if an
> "official" project mechanism is built, I'll have some work to do. ;)

I think we don't need another project mechanism in Emacs. EDE and
dir-locals should be enough. What we have to do however is to develop at
least one very basic project type in EDE which can be used similar to
project-root.el. I think what Sudish Joseph explained in this thread is
pretty typical:

- Recognizing projects based on some files or directories which are in
  the current directory or further up the tree.

- The ability to ask Emacs of what project the current buffer is part
  of.

- Automatic setting of variables based on the current project.

The user should be able to configure this in a variable, similar to how
project-root.el does it. For example:

("Perl Project"
   :root-contains ("t" "lib")
   :on-load 'some-function 
   :variable-settings '((tab-width . 4)
                        (fill-column . 79)))

This is easy to implement with EDE. I can work on this, but I'd like to
finish my five other things which are 90% finished first...

> Also be aware that I ran into a lot of performance issues I had to
> work through with EDE project detection.  Once other code starts
> asking where it is in a project, it's amazing how often that stuff
> gets called.  A project cache is a super handy thing, and was one of
> the key performance improvements I made back when i was trying to
> speed up smart completion.

Yes, I know. This is why I think EDE should be the framework on which
those things are built.

-David