Re: user-controlled load-path extension: load-dir

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Mon, 07 Mar 2011 21:46:10 -0500 Stefan Monnier <address@hidden> wrote: 

>> I think this proposal is really about code snippets that people would
>> otherwise just cut and paste into their .emacs file.  The average
>> user's .emacs often winds up containing mostly code they found
>> somewhere and use without really understanding it.  Dropping each
>> snippit in its own file would be a big help if the user ever did need
>> to debug some problem with his init, or if he decided one day to
>> actually learn elisp.

SM> I'm far from convinced it's better for people to drop random chunks of
SM> configuration into separate files rather than all in the .emacs file.

It's not "better," it's what people already do.  Emacs would just make
it easier than the current situation, which is to drop a file plus edit
the .emacs every time a file is added or deleted.  What other choice is
there to modularize .emacs?

SM> If you're talking about downloading random files containing
SM> configuration code (so the user doesn't have to create a file, inventing
SM> a file name for it), then maybe that could make sense, but I haven't
SM> seen such files very much, and I suspect many of them could easily be
SM> turned either into themes or into packages installable via package.el.

Obviously that works for package managers like el-get.

OK, let's say I have the 8 files I listed earlier (tzz.emacs.*.el).  I
want to load them modularly.  So I put them in the load-dir.  Do I have
to make 8 packages?  And every time I update one of those files, do I
have to repackage it with a new version?  That seems workable but
tedious compared to the code proposed by Ben Key and Evans Winner.

If you're against including the load-dir in the core and enabling it by
default, how about making it a GNU ELPA package so it's easily
installable?

On Tue, 8 Mar 2011 01:14:37 -0600 Ben Key <address@hidden> wrote: 

BK> I am attaching to this message a quick implementation of this feature I
BK> threw together in about an hour.  I am not familiar with the Emacs package
BK> mechanism but I am certain that this could be converted to an Emacs package
BK> without too much work thus making it easier to install.

On Tue, 08 Mar 2011 02:58:03 -0700 Evans Winner <address@hidden> wrote: 

EW> For what it's worth, this is the thing I have in my .emacs.
EW> It does what I want it to, which is just to allow me to
EW> break my .emacs into various not-excessively-long files
EW> organized by subject, like email config, org-mode config and
EW> so-forth.

Thanks for your code.  Both of your solutions are similar to what I
would like to use, but Mike Mattie's concerns about startup behavior
(mainly for daemon mode, for --batch mode, and when there are errors)
are valid.  The recursion behavior should probably not be the default by
parallel with other such systems I listed, e.g. /etc/rc.d and Bazaar's
plugins directory.  It's easy enough to make it optional or to write a
snippet that loads a specific subdirectory.  The argument I have against
recursion is that it's hard to tell at a glance what's going to get
loaded.

It seems no one thinks prompting about new or changed files in the
load-dir is worthwhile, so never mind about that part of my proposal.

Thanks
Ted