Re: Project systems (again)

[Daniel Colascione]

On 04/17/2014 11:37 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> Date: Thu, 17 Apr 2014 14:52:44 -0700
>> From: Daniel Colascione <address@hidden>
>>
>> I'd like to include a good, minimal "project system" in Emacs 24.5 and
>> turn it on by default.
> 
> IMO, this would be a very good progress, thanks.
> 
>> EDE already provides some of the functionality I've described above, but
>> I don't like the way it does it. It's very complicated and embeds
>> uncommon features into the core. EDE's reliance on EIEIO and its large
>> feature-set create difficulties dumping the system with Emacs. And have
>> you tried actually creating a new EDE project type? It's surprisingly
>> and disappointingly difficult. Ad-hoc extensibility with EDE is hard
>> because of its EIEIO use, and I don't think EIEIO is buying us anything,
>> really.
>>
>> EDE also includes many features that are not generally useful (like
>> makefile generation) and that complicate the codebase. EDE being
>> developed out-of-tree makes it hard to fix these issues. I'd rather have
>> a minimal and more idiomatically Emacs-ish core facility that EDE can
>> build on. EDE is also not currently integrated with VC, and it doesn't
>> provide nice user interfaces (ede-find-file, for example, doesn't do
>> completion.)
> 
> FWIW, I'd prefer that you work with EDE developers to improve and
> extend what they have;

If EIEIO can't be preloaded (or, equivalent morally, autoloaded on
find-file), there's no point in pursuing EDE improvements. An EIEIO-less
EDE would be an EDE rewrite anyway. Plus, I don't think the problem
space really warrants a complex object system: conventional elisp idioms
are adequate.

> starting from scratch (or almost from scratch)
> sounds like waste of effort, especially since some of the EDE is
> already in Emacs. 

I really don't want to start from scratch, but I think it's the best
option. A project system is one of those systems for which the hard part
isn't the coding, but agreeing on having a single interface to the code.
I think we need something much simpler than what exists.

> I find the Makefile generation feature useful
> (e.g., when you need to develop on one platform, then build the same
> code and run it on another, where the full development environment is
> not necessarily installed).

There's no reason that a system like that couldn't be built on top of a
minimal project architecture, or why you couldn't use EDE's current
implementation. (I hope it's easy to see how EDE could plug into a more
generic system.)

>  In any case, I don't see how unused
> features could get in your way too much, unless their design is wrong.

I find the abstractions in EDE to be much more confusing than they are
useful. For something that, at its core, ought to be very simple, there
are too many concepts --- target, project, sub-project, config, project
placeholder, too much shared state, and too few opportunities for ad-hoc
customization. The system feels specialized for a project based on
nested autoconf files that build C and C++, and the documentation
reflects that. I understand that EDE started simple and grew
functionality, but this functionality belongs in separate layers, not
mingled into the core.

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