Re: Some developement questions

[Alexis <flexibeast@gmail.com>]

hw <hw@adminart.net> writes:

> Maybe Emacs should give us warnings when it discovers outdated, 
> deprecated or useless settings in ~/.emacs.

i imagine many people might want this; but many people might /not/ 
want this if it has a noticeable impact on startup times. Startup 
times don't usually have an impact on me personally, since i run 
an Emacs server at machine startup and connect clients to 
that. From what i've read, however, a number of people find even 
an extra 0.5s-1.0s in startup to be significant when jumping in 
and out of a non-client Emacs instance. So if this feature did 
have an impact on startup times, people would want to be able to 
enable and disable it at will.

> get into documentation hell because it's hard to tell which 
> documentation is up to date

One of the pleasures i find in using Emacs is its extensive 
accompanying documentation, documentation which (in my experience) 
is typically far better maintained than that of many other 
projects[1]. As someone who has been using Emacs for around 20 
years, i very much appreciate the comprehensive NEWS file with 
each release, which allows me to quite quickly ascertain what 
changes have been made that might affect my configuration and 
workflow (e.g. changed default values).

i say this because i'm wondering which area(s) of documentation 
you're having these difficulties with? If you're talking about the 
Emacs Wiki at emacswiki.org, well, as far as i'm aware, that's not 
an official wiki, is it[2]? Nor is wikemacs.org. i personally much 
prefer the latter to the former. But i strongly feel that people's 
first destinations when searching for documentation should be the 
Emacs Manual and the Emacs Lisp Reference Manual - only after not 
being able to locate the information in those manuals, making sure 
to make use their excellent indexes, should one consider trying to 
find information on the two wikis. i regularly find myself 
responding to "How do I do X in Emacs?" questions with "Here's the 
relevant section of the relevant manual." At any rate, one should 
certainly consider submitting a bug report about inadequate or 
inaccurate documentation for functionality shipped with 
Emacs. Even if no volunteer can immediately address it, at least 
it's recorded as something for potential volunteers to work on.

> I had auto-complete working (until I disabled it because it got 
> into my way by trying to automatically complete everything when 
> I used Emacs for something I didn't install auto-complete for), 
> installed from a git repo somewhere on github.

Do you literally mean the `auto-complete.el' package and its 
associated `ac-*' packages? Is that still maintained? i'm using 
`company` as my autocompletion framework, myself. But neither is 
shipped with Emacs, and there's no index entry for `auto-complete' 
or `autocomplete' in the Emacs Manual, which probably comes as a 
surprise to the many people who have come to expect autocompletion 
as basic functionality in a programming environment .... i think 
this is indeed a problem, but unfortunately, i don't have any 
suggestions as to how it might be addressed. :-(


Alexis.

--

[1] OpenBSD is probably the other project i think of when thinking 
of excellence in documentation. Comparing `man 4 intro' for the 
Linux kernel vs. `man 4 intro' for the OpenBSD kernel is 
eye-opening.

[2] i have the impression that many people assume it /is/ an 
official Emacs wiki, so if its not, this fact might need to be 
somehow emphasised or made more clear.