Re: make-variable-buffer-local change

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

>>>>> "Drew" == Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com> writes:
[long rant]

I understand you.  But currently, nobody really knows what
list-buffers-directory is for.  Originally, it was just for
communication between dired/shell and list-buffers so its semantics was
pretty simple and didn't matter much (any string was fair game).
Then uniquify appeared and abused it for some slightly different purpose
(i.e. get a buffer-file-name for dired buffers, who normally set
buffer-file-name to nil to avoid timestamp checks and things like that),
where the semantics was more delicate: the string has to be a filename
and should be (to some extent) unique.  So uniquify only uses
list-buffers-directory for some major modes, but not all (see
uniquify-list-buffers-directory-modes).

I.e. "what list-buffers-directory is for" is currently ill-defined.
Rather than try and describe really what it does, it would be better to
re-shape it a bit.  Maybe 2 variables are in order, or maybe the
shell-mode case (which shouldn't influence uniquify) should use
a different value than just a string, so uniquify can tell whether to
use the value or not without having to check the major-mode.

Also its name should be changed because it's not just for "list-buffers"
any more.  Maybe buffer-file-name-replacement or
pseudo-buffer-file-name, or buffer-quasi-file-name, or ...


        Stefan