Re: Split off some backends from Company?

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 08/12/2014 07:50 PM, Stefan Monnier wrote:

> Rather than push them to separate packages, it would be preferable to
> turn them into completion-at-point-functions and push them to their
> corresponding parent package (i.e. to BBDB, oddmuse, and ropemacs).

Good point. We've discussed this before, but thanks for the reminder.

Doing that with company-bbdb would be hard, but looks like it'll be 
obsolete as soon as `message-completion-function' starts behaving 
correctly: `message-expand-name-databases' includes `bbdb' by default.

> > Maybe also company-yasnippet.
>
> Same here.

Probably not: using yasnippet as a completion source is a questionable 
decision, which each user should make themselves. It replaces the 
advertised way to interact with yasnippet (type the snippet key, press 
TAB), and the recommended way to use this backend is to group it with 
others, not by itself (think `completion-table-merge' instead of 
`completion-table-in-turn'), so putting it in 
`completion-at-point-functions' would probably be misguided.

> > Taking it further, we could do the same that depend on specific external
> > programs to be available, but not Elisp code: ...
>
> There's no such obvious "parent package" to hold those, so I guess
> separate ELPA packages would be OK.

Okay, it's good to have your approval. They're pretty unobtrusive, 
though, so I'll come back to them later.

> > - The setup proceduce for each such backend becomes more complicated: you
> > have to install the backend, its dependencies (happens automatically),
> > external dependencies, and add 1-2 new lines to your init file.
>
> Usually, enough ;;;###autoload trickery can do the setup transparently
> for the user.

Hmm, yes. I guess we could do that if the user explicitly installed a 
backend package.