Re: Is it time to create more subdirs in lisp/?

[Deniz Dogan <deniz@dogan.se>]

On 2011-09-02 11:39, Richard Riley wrote:
> Alan Mackenzie<acm@muc.de>  writes:
>
>> Hi, Deniz.
>>
>> On Thu, Sep 01, 2011 at 07:44:02AM +0200, Deniz Dogan wrote:
>>> The lisp/ directory in trunk could use some more subdirectories.
>>
>>> Examples:
>>
>>> dired-aux.el
>>> dired-x.el
>>> dired.el
>>> epa-dired.el
>>> find-dired.el
>>> image-dired.el
>>
>>> help-at-pt.el
>>> help-fns.el
>>> help-macro.el
>>> help-mode.el
>>> help.el
>>
>>> ps-bdf.el
>>> ps-def.el
>>> ps-mule.el
>>> ps-print.el
>>> ps-samp.el
>>
>> I'd say no.  once you start making small directories they're going to
>> start stacking up in an increasingly tall tree.
>>
>> I've been in proprietary projects with around 20,000 files in them, all
>> in directories with ~8-10 files in each.  Visiting a file in such a
>> hierarchy is a nightmare, as you have to enter, perhaps, 6 successive
>> directory names to get there.  That's a lot of names to have to navigate
>> through.
>>
>> I've been told that small directories are optimal for selecting files
>> with dialog boxes, but that's not how Emacs works.  I sometimes find it
>> irritating even to have to go one level down from ../lisp to
>> ../lisp/progmodes.
>>
>> So my vote is for few large directories rather than many small ones.  I
>> would go further than Stefan, and say a new directory we create should
>> have at least 100 files, not 20.
>
> Fwiw, I would agree with that. Small dirs look nice on paper in
> orgnisation charts but soon become a selection and maintenance
> nightmare. Especially with built in smart file pickers/selects like
> ido-mode there to ease the burden. Certainly my once hierarchical emacs
> setup soon became a single .emacs.d ... Smart filenames are the key -
> prefix is good.
>

I see your point, and I could definitely agree.  I especially agree with 
you about smart filenames!  As you saw, I missed a few files in my examples.