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

[Durand <mmemmew@gmail.com>]

>>>>> On Sun, 19 Sep 2021 17:01:27 +0000, Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com> said:

    >> 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.

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

    Drew> And I commend the features the doc describes.

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

I have seen your library before writing BList.  But my main motivation
was the Ibuffer-like display, and Bookmark+ does not seem to provide one
(at least I cannot tell from its docs), so I wrote BList anyways.  :)

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

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

Well, Bookmark+ is already huge and provides many useful
functionalities.  I would surprised if my simple package has any new
features.  ;P

That being said, have you looked into `blist-select' and
`blist-select-manner'?  I think that is probably the "strangest" feature
of this package, and hence the most likely to be new.  It might be fun
anyways.  :)

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

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

Thanks for the appreciation.  :D

    Drew> A minor hiccup we both might want to work around:

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

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

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

I am still thinking of better ways to do that indeed.  Maybe I can use a
function to produce the filter groups automatically.  I am not familiar
with the Customize UI though, so I will have to look up how to make it
easy in the Customize UI.

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

I am not using Bookmark+ myself.  Surely I can recommend to use
Bookmark+ features in the documentations / README.  Or are you
suggesting for blist to depend on and extend Bookmark+?

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

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

I really like Ibuffer: it makes managing buffers simple and easy.  :D

By the way, I thought I would like to display registers by ilist in a
similar way (and adapt in another of my package "rlist"), but after some
experiments that kind of display does not look good for registers to me,
so I am still estimating the possibilities.  (rlist can be found here:
<https://gitlab.com/mmemmew/rlist/>)

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

Indeed.

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

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

Sure, I will look into that in the coming future.

-- 
Durand