Re: [AUCTeX-devel] multi-file support

[Ralf Angeli]

* David Kastrup (2005-05-06) writes:

> Ralf Angeli <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> This would mean to revert to the behavior or pre-11.5x AUCTeX
>> versions where the master file question popped up in quite random
>> situations, e.g. when you clicked on a menu.  Not good.
>
> Uh, disagree.  The problem was not that the master file question
> popped up when clicking on a menu (like "insert environment"): that's
> exactly when the question needs to get resolved.

Technically, yes.  But from a user's point of view it is likely to
appear like a random point in time.  I don't think that everybody will
be able to associate the qestion popping up with the necessary update
of the environment menus.

> The problem was that we were not able to find code that did not either
> break under Windows or XEmacs or some other circumstances.  Asking
> questions before opening a menu generated based on the answer of those
> questions simply was not possible to do on the current set of Emacsen
> we have chosen to support.  Maybe it helps a bit that we have by now
> kissed 20.7 goodbye.

Well, I rewrote the whole dynamic menu stuff which now uses proper
menu filters.  So this might have improved the situation as well.

But the approach via the menu is flawed.  You can insert environments
without clicking the menu.  So we'd need a more general scheme for
detecting when the relevant styles have to be loaded, i.e. the master
file question be asked.

AFAICS we have two reasonable possibilities: (1) Ask the question when
the file is being loaded or (2) when an event happens which requires
all relevant styles to be loaded.  While I already expressed my
concerns about alternative 2 above, alternative 1 has drawbacks as
well, like the user being asked about the master file if she only
wants to have a look at it without editing.  But there is no way
avoiding this if we consider font locking which requires all relevant
styles to be loaded even if you only want to look at the file in order
to get fontification right.  Of course, this is not necessary if you
don't have font locking enabled, but it would probably not make sense
to implement an additional scheme for the master file question in this
case.

Regarding the current problem report about the 'shared case, I'd ask
the question on load by changing the stanza we add to
`find-file-hooks' in `VirTeX-common-initialization'.  But I haven't
tested this yet.

> If it had been possible to get this working
> reasonably at the time we tried it, then we could have introduced an
> extra value ask-only-if-new for the current behavior without losing
> the old behavior: while Reiner likes ask-only-if-new better, it is
> quite problematic for a number of cases, and so making this a user
> preference instead eat-or-die would be very much desirable.

A change in `VirTeX-common-initialization' could make this possible as
well.  But this will not restore the old behavior.  Instead the
question will be asked on load.

-- 
Ralf