RE: non noisy dired

["Drew Adams" <drew.adams@oracle.com>]

> > http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/DiredDetails
> > 
> > You'll never have to see anything other than the file name, 
> > unless you want to, and you can do that by hitting a toggle key.
>
> This is probably OT, but still. When you mentioned this extension I 
> tried out dired-details+.el. It works perfectly as expected 
> when I load it using `M-x load-library dired-details+'.
> 
> However if I put (require 'dired-details+) in my .emacs, I 
> get "Symbol's value as variable is void: dired-mode-map"
> 
> What am I doing wrong here? I am very new to emacs, just a 
> few months. So its very likely I could be missing something trivial.

No, you were not doing anything wrong.
Here's the explanation (it was a bug):

(require 'dired-details+) loads dired-details+, which in turn does (require
'dired-details), which loads dired-details.

But neither explicitly loads dired, which is where variable `dired-mode-map' is
defined. After it loads dired-details, dired-details+ tries to use that variable
at load time --> error.

Should be fixed now. The fix is to use the variable not at load time, but after
dired is loaded.

Thx - Drew

P.S. Two years ago, the author of dired-details.el, Rob Giardina, integrated all
of the dired-details.el and dired-details+.el features into Emacs - he submitted
a comprehensive patch. The Emacs developers seemed to agree to this addition,
but they never followed up, so it never happened. I've ping'ed them several
times about it (the last time was 2008-11-12), with zero response. Too bad.
Rob's integration was clean, avoiding the `defadvice' and other hoops that these
two libraries jump through.