Re: A unified project root interface

[Eric M. Ludlam]

On 03/19/2013 03:18 AM, David Engster wrote:
> John Yates writes:
> > I took the sense of the OP to be that the concept of a project-root
> > deserved to become part of the core set of emacs concepts unrelated to
> > optional packages e.g. much as file and directory local variables.
> > Once the concept gets pulled into the core extension author simply
> > assume existence of project-root functionality without needing to have
> > to enable in any particular way.
>
> OK, if this is something which should be available with emacs -Q right
> at startup, then EDE is out. It indeed is too big for that.

Hi David,

If you look at ede/base.el at the baseclass ede-project-placeholder, you 
will see bits from an old implementation of a project cache.  It used to 
save just the root directories between emacs sessions, and the 
placeholder was used in the project cache to speed up detection.  The 
goal was a "Recent Projects" menu item to load projects from.  I never 
got that far though.

It should be possible to revive that old bit of code and have a mode of 
EDE that only creates placeholders for detected projects, and only loads 
the project if the user asks, calls 'ede-compile', or some other 
explicit action.

In this scenario, I'm sure it would be possible to trim ede/base.el, and 
ede.el to be minimal, and provide just the root project detection.  CLOS 
would still be involved, but the result would be pretty light-weight.

I'd be happy to help figure that out if it would be useful.

Eric