Re: progmodes/project.el and search paths

[Stephen Leake]

Dmitry Gutov <address@hidden> writes:

> On 08/05/2015 05:49 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>
>>> Not very interesting, IMHO.
>>
>> I don't understand this criterion.  I think the criterion should be
>> "is this useful".
>
> Just a criterion for what I spend time on.

Since we are discussing core Emacs functionality, you should be clearer
about this. There is a big difference between:

- that would be a useful core feature, but I don't want to work on it

and

- that would not be a useful core feature.


> Do you really consider this on the same of usefulness as, say,
> xref-find-references?

Personally, I use 'make' much more than I use cross reference tools, so
yes, build is more useful.

For Emacs core, they are both important, which is why we have 'compile'
and 'xref-find-*'.

For project.el, this fits into "provide build related project
information to other elisp programs" in a couple of ways:

- 'compile' tries to provide tab completion on Makefile targets; it
doesn't do it well (it misses targets in #include <makefile>).
Presumably EDE can do better, so project.el should provide
project-build-targets, so compile can use that to provide the completion
list. That would then automatically work for ant, gradle, etc projects
as those are added to EDE or another project implementation.

- 'compile' also tries to guess the build command; it could use
project-build-command.

-- 
-- Stephe