From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: "Drew Adams" Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.devel Subject: RE: completion.el users? Date: Sat, 11 May 2013 14:16:05 -0700 Message-ID: <943243026FFC4D699528918175E0ABDC@us.oracle.com> References: <87vc6p8sdi@ch.ristopher.com><87li7lo4p8.fsf@yandex.ru><0BA3DA32EEC343739CFE4229CA94FD5B@us.oracle.com> <87txm9uxmp@ch.ristopher.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: plane.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: ger.gmane.org 1368306983 22490 80.91.229.3 (11 May 2013 21:16:23 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@ger.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 11 May 2013 21:16:23 +0000 (UTC) To: "'Christopher Schmidt'" , Original-X-From: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Sat May 11 23:16:23 2013 Return-path: Envelope-to: ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([208.118.235.17]) by plane.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1UbH9S-00010B-G0 for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Sat, 11 May 2013 23:16:22 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([::1]:45202 helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1UbH9R-0003Nk-Gm for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Sat, 11 May 2013 17:16:21 -0400 Original-Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([208.118.235.92]:36566) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1UbH9N-0003NR-1K for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Sat, 11 May 2013 17:16:18 -0400 Original-Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1UbH9L-0001m0-Tz for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Sat, 11 May 2013 17:16:16 -0400 Original-Received: from aserp1040.oracle.com ([141.146.126.69]:35720) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1UbH9L-0001lf-OB for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Sat, 11 May 2013 17:16:15 -0400 Original-Received: from acsinet21.oracle.com (acsinet21.oracle.com [141.146.126.237]) by aserp1040.oracle.com (Sentrion-MTA-4.3.1/Sentrion-MTA-4.3.1) with ESMTP id r4BLGCRE009854 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA bits=256 verify=OK); Sat, 11 May 2013 21:16:13 GMT Original-Received: from userz7021.oracle.com (userz7021.oracle.com [156.151.31.85]) by acsinet21.oracle.com (8.14.4+Sun/8.14.4) with ESMTP id r4BLGBv7011086 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA bits=256 verify=FAIL); Sat, 11 May 2013 21:16:12 GMT Original-Received: from abhmt120.oracle.com (abhmt120.oracle.com [141.146.116.72]) by userz7021.oracle.com (8.14.4+Sun/8.14.4) with ESMTP id r4BLGBff029610; Sat, 11 May 2013 21:16:11 GMT Original-Received: from dradamslap1 (/71.202.147.44) by default (Oracle Beehive Gateway v4.0) with ESMTP ; Sat, 11 May 2013 14:16:10 -0700 X-Mailer: Microsoft Office Outlook 11 In-Reply-To: <87txm9uxmp@ch.ristopher.com> thread-index: Ac5OfT1/zb9Y40YvSQ2V/hdMWtWGzAAAT6pQ X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2900.6157 X-Source-IP: acsinet21.oracle.com [141.146.126.237] X-detected-operating-system: by eggs.gnu.org: GNU/Linux 2.4.x-2.6.x [generic] X-Received-From: 141.146.126.69 X-BeenThere: emacs-devel@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.14 Precedence: list List-Id: "Emacs development discussions." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Original-Sender: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.devel:159518 Archived-At: > > The question is whether Emacs already contains a reasonable > > replacement for completion.el. > > Is it? That was my question, yes. > There is no replacement for completion.el in vanilla GNU > Emacs. Stefan does know that. Well I did not know it, and no one has said it until you did just now. Why remove a perfectly good feature, which has enjoyed lots of Emacs users over many years, if Emacs offers no replacement for it? (BTW, try writing your next novel using vanilla Emacs both with and without completions.el, and you might just see whether you find it useful.) There are lots of different kinds of Emacs users, with different use cases. And even if only a minority of users make use of some library, that does not mean that the library is useless for those users and should be deprecated without offering them a reasonable substitute. > The questions is whether to deprecate a package that is neither > maintained not exactly used any more and that breaks Elisp coding > conventions big time. > > Considering that auto-complete-mode is GPLv3'ed and the de-facto > standard package for text-agnostic auto-completion within > Emacs, I think deprecating is worth a try. I disagree. If a-c-m is added to Emacs and is made to do what completion.el does, then I probably would agree. Until then, completion.el serves a purpose and deserves to stay. I see no reason to deprecate completion.el without an Emacs replacement, just because it supposedly "breaks Elisp coding conventions big time" (which is an exaggeration, IMO). Or just because it supposedly is "not exactly used any more" - which is not demonstrated. Just googling "dynamic-completion-mode" gives 50K+ hits, some (other than this thread) as recent as 5 days ago. No, like your GIT search, that is admittedly _not_ a good indicator of the use of completion.el. But it does not suggest either that it is "not exactly used any more". What is the real impetus for wanting to deprecate completion.el now? That the "last non-cosmetic patch for it was made in 2007" is not a strike against it, IMHO. Not at all. And all the less so if that is reinforced with the "argument" that that "seems surprisingly long for a 90KB file." Completion.el has been in use for a long time. And it is not a catch-all file like simple.el, which would understandably be updated frequently. And (_not_ surprisingly) there are plenty of other files, of similar size, that exhibit the same relative non-cosmetic inactivity: calculator.el, arc-mode.el, filesets.el, image-dired.el, ada-xref.el, ebnf2ps.el,... I think that ebnf2ps.el, for example, is wonderful, and extremely useful for anyone who needs what it does, but there have been very few non-cosmetic changes to it in quite a while. It just works (well). Perhaps it has few users (dunno), but I am sure they are happy users. "Surprisingly long", indeed. [BTW, why do people feel the need to pepper their praise or damnation for something with "astonishingly", "surprisingly", and the like? Too much hype. Sounds like a "whiter than white!" laundry commercial (merci, Coluche - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vVaWFw54ig).] So far, it sounds like the main reason for wanting to deprecate completion.el now might just be that it uses prefix `completion-'. Really, where's the beef?