Re: [Emacs-diffs] emacs-25 f8208b6: Document the user-level features of the Xref package

[Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@stephe-leake.org>]

John Wiegley <jwiegley@gmail.com> writes:

>>>>>> Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru> writes:
>
>> Are you both proposing that we rename all project- commands to xref-?
>> Despite the fact that the former act on the current project, using simple
>> operations (Grep files or list files), and the existing xref- commands all
>> use data provided by the current xref backend?
>
> Think of a user who isn't aware of the distinction between project and xref.
> Which command would make the most sense to them at the M-x prompt?

First response is; tell them to read the relevant manual sections, this
stuff is _not_ trivial.

Second response; that depends on what they want to accomplish.

If they want to perform a find-and-replace of a string on all the files
in the current project, then "project" makes the most sense.

If they've just used xref to produce a list of references, and now want
to perform a find-and-replace on those, "xref" makes the most sense.

There is a confusion between xref and project; xref must operate on some
set of files, and one job of project is provide a set of files. But
xref does not rely solely on project for the set, hence the confusion.

I think we should move more towards relying on "project" commands for
operations on sets of files; xref is then mostly a tool that project
commands use.

Another way to look at this is that any xref backend should also provide
a project backend, so the two sets of commands always operate on the
same set of files.

--
-- Stephe