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

[Richard Riley <rileyrg@googlemail.com>]

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.