RE: [External] : [ELPA] Want to submit two packages "ilist" and "blist"

[Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com>]

> I have written two Emacs pacakges, called "ilist"
> and "blist" (the former is the "engine", and hence
> a dependency, of the latter).  Now I am thinking
> about submitting the packages to GNU ELPA.
> 
> The package "blist" is to display the list of
> bookmarks, in the sense of "bookmark.el", in a
> similar way as Ibuffer.

As the author of Bookmark+, I want to say that
I'm positively impressed by your attention to
documenting, which I can tell just by looking
at the provided PDFs.

And I commend the features the doc describes.

From just reading that doc, it appears that all
of the Blist features are already features of
Bookmark+.  (Of course, Blist is young.)

That's _good_.  It suggests that such features
are in fact helpful (it corroborates having them
in Bookmark+).

It's also a bit disappointing to me, though, as
I was hoping to find some new features that I
might want to consider for possible addition or
adaptation to Bookmark+, to improve it.  But I
haven't found any that are missing, so far.

It's no doubt worth my looking at the code too
at some point, to see if there are undocumented
features or if there's something else to be
learned from what you've done.

So Bravo!  Thanks for your attention to bookmark
presentation.  And thanks in particular for the
good job documenting what you've created.
___

A minor hiccup we both might want to work around:

Emacs 28 replaced the hard-coded string
"*Bookmark List*" as the name of the list buffer
with the defconst `bookmark-bmenu-buffer' with
that string value.

Both Bookmark+ and blist.el use that "constant",
which means they use the same buffer.  It might
be good for our code to use different variables
for the buffer name.  E.g., I could add and use
a user option `bmkp-bmenu-buffer', whose default
value is that of `bookmark-bmenu-buffer'.  And
you could do similarly.  (Just a suggestion.)
___

A minor suggestion for `blist-filter-groups':
Instead of just telling users to put the default
group at the end of the groups list, you might
want to either do that automatically or provide
an easy way to do that in the Customize UI.

[BTW, you (and users) can directly use the many
 existing Bookmark+ type predicates in Blist
 filter groups: e.g., `bmkp-info-bookmark-p' for
 Info bookmarks, `bmkp-dired-bookmark-p' for
 Dired bookmarks, `bmkp-desktop-bookmark-p' for
 Desktop bookmarks,...

 With Bookmark+ there are no named groups, but
 you can sort by bookmark kind using `s k'.
 You can sort in many (23) ways; sorting by
 bookmark type is one way. ]
___

It's interesting that you took as your point of
departure Ibuffer.  (And it's no doubt useful
to have built blist.el on top of the more
general ilist.el.)

I took Dired as one of my points of departure,
for the bookmark-list display.  The UI is very
close to that of Dired.  But I think that
Ibuffer itself took the Dired UI as a starting
point, so there's a lot of similarity between
where you ended up and where I did, wrt the UI.

Just as I might learn something looking at
what you've done, I invite you to look at what
Bookmark+ does, if you're interested.

https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/BookmarkPlus