Re: CEDET discoverability

[David Reitter <david.reitter@gmail.com>]

On Jul 14, 2010, at 5:38 PM, Chong Yidong wrote:
> 
> That's what the subnodes are for.  See "Semantic mode user commands" for
> a list of commands enabled by Semantic mode. 

Starting out, how do I tell that it is the "Semantic" package that I want to use in the first place?

M-x info gives

* Semantic: (semantic).         Source code parser library and utilities.

While all people with a CS degree should know what "parser" means, this headline does not adequately describe what it does at the _user_ level.  Internally it parses it and provides libraries, but how it goes about providing its services hardly matters to the user.  Nor can you inspect the newbie to infer these things.

I don't know what the right description is - I don't know Semantic well enough.  Apple calls it "CodeSense", which is a bit better (Sense as English translation of Semantic), but that's still pretty idiosyncratic.  If there's an established term in the Eclipse/NetBeans/whatever world, then that would be good (because people may well know it).

Dito for the menu entry, "Source Code Parsers (Semantic)".  Emacs jargon.

Other bad entries in the info directory include

* Auth-source: (auth).          The Emacs auth-source library.  [user level? different node in info directory?]
* MH-E: (mh-e).                 Emacs interface to the MH mail system.   [ is this e-mail?? ]
* Mairix: (mairix-el).          Emacs interface to the Mairix mail indexer.  [ indexing?  it's about searching&finding, to the user!]
* SASL: (sasl).                 The Emacs SASL library.  [user level? different node in info directory?]


That said, most of the headlines in the info top node are actually pretty good!