Hi Maxime, sorry for the late reply!

Maxime Devos <maximedevos@telenet.be> writes:

> [[PGP Signed Part:Undecided]]
> Pierre Langlois schreef op di 29-03-2022 om 20:43 [+0100]:
>> +                  ;; The BUNDLE-VERSION file prevents emacs-tree-sitter-langs
>> +                  ;; from downloading libraries at load time.
>
> WDYT of patching emacs-tree-sitter-langs to not download, such that it
> doesn't download and run non-Guix libraries behind the user's back?

The way the current patchset works, by providing a compatible bundle, we
already prevent emacs-tree-sitter-langs from downloading binaries by
default.  I agree we could go further though, and entirely remove the
code that downloads binaries.

However I'm not sure about it.  Essentially, there is a
tree-sitter-langs-build.el file [0] that can either download binaries or
fetch sources and compile locally.  So a user could decide to opt-out of
using Guix binaries and instead use an alternative method.

I 100% agree that by default we should make the package use Guix
libraries, this way it also /just works/.  However, if somebody wants to
do things differently, I'm not sure we want to get in the way.  In the
end, this isn't so different from letting people use an alternative
package manager if they like.  We'd rather people used Guix of course :-).

I don't have a really strong opinion about this though, so if you still
prefer to delete the downloading code, I've attached an example patch
that entirely replace it with a bare-bones implementation as an example.

Let me know what you think!

[0]: https://github.com/emacs-tree-sitter/tree-sitter-langs/blob/master/tree-sitter-langs-build.el

> Also, why do we need a bundle at all, would simply installing emacs-
> tree-sitter, and, e.g., tree-sitter-java, just work?

Yeah, having a bundle is fundamentally how this package works AFAICT.

I think the main reason is that in order to do highlighting effectively
in emacs, it's not enough to install the tree-sitter runtime and a
tree-sitter-<lang> grammar.  You also want to "configure" how the
highlighting is done by providing custom "queries" expressions.

And this package provides queries for every language that it supports:
https://github.com/emacs-tree-sitter/tree-sitter-langs/tree/master/queries

All that being said, I believe that long-term the idea is that upstream
language-specific packages would eventually gain support for tree-sitter
and then this bundle "glue" package will no longer be necessary.
Especially if one day emacs proper gains native support for tree-sitter
(I think I saw some discussions about that on emacs-devel last year).

But given this package is quite useful though, I'd be surprised if it
goes away soon.

Hope this makes sense!

Thanks,
Pierre

>
> Greetings,
> Maxime.
>
> [[End of PGP Signed Part]]