RE: Oop customization group

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

> Also, I don't think the structure of these groups is very 
> well though[t] out: We have "Languages", then "Tools", which
> is helpfully labeled "Programming tools".  What's a tool,
> and what's not?  I think this means "general utilities:
> tools for programming in any language".
> But the structuring isn't good in the first place... 
> there are just two entries in the "Programming" group.
> This doesn't justify an extra level in the hierarchy.

Group inheritance can be multiple. This is essentially a tagging mechanism (in
the sense of del.icio.us tags, not Emacs tags), whether or not it was intended
that way. Perhaps the UI should reflect this more directly - be more like the
kinds of access typically provided for tag sets. Dunno.

I'm not a big user of tagging UIs, so I don't have an opinion about that. But
that's the way I see Emacs groups now - not so much as a hierarchical directory
structure, more like a tagging mechanism.

There are some tagging UIs in Emacs. IIUC, Org mode has one, and a few others
can be found on Emacs Wiki. Dunno if it would be worth it to adapt access to
Customize groups more along such lines.

Yes, some cleanup of the predefined groups might help. But as you point out,
it's not always super clear what each category/group/tag is supposed to
represent.

Yes, I agree that finding things by group/tag is not as simple as it might be.
No, I don't have any specific suggestions.

One problem with Customize seems to be that it's hard to find people who want to
work on it, to make improvements. Another problem is that it's hard to find
agreement here about what should be done. But if you have a minor, incremental
suggestion (fix) wrt Customize groups, there's a chance it would be adopted.