Re: project.el semantics

[Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru>]

On 11/11/2015 06:48 PM, John Wiegley wrote:
> The among of discussion on project.el semantics makes it pretty clear that
> there is a lack of both clarity and consensus among us. We should take a step
> back to define what we want project.el to actually "do", in exact terms. We
> can then look at the implementation through that lens, and make changes
> accordingly.

It's supposed to be a generic replacement for the top-level EDE 
ede-project class, more or less.

> Having read this thread, and looked at the code, I'm still not clear on what a
> "project root" is, what a "project library root" is, why it's different, and
> what "outside the project" means.

There are places in the filesystem on the user machine that are not 
"inside" the project.

Those are outside. Does "external to the project" sound better?

> For this to be ready for 25.1, I would like a dead simple definition of what
> project.el provides, something that takes up maybe a page in the Emacs manual.

Since you both don't understand the few sentences that seem clear to me, 
I'm apparently an utter failure of a technical writer. Which is not 
terribly surprising, considering it's my second language.

Volunteers to write the manual are welcome.

> I *think* it's a core API for identifying directories and/or files within some
> notion of a "project", so that tooling can build on top of it to search source
> files, ignore build products in dired, create TAGS, etc.

Pretty much. But:

Not "within the project", but related to the project. Does the term 
"library" sound familiar?