Re: [Emacs-diffs] emacs-25 f8208b6: Document the user-level features of the Xref package

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 01/21/2016 11:32 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> > Dired's command makes sense: when there's no project, or we want to
> > search some dirs specifically, we can fire up Dired, select the
> > directories and files one by one, and do the search.
>
> The same with a backend: it selects the files to search.

We wouldn't want to use a command that searches an arbitrary set of 
files, which depends only on the mood of the person who wrote a 
particular backend. Stricter semantics are needed.

Furhermore, Dired's commands we're replacing had default bindings. 
tags-search only has a menu entry.

> > When you call xref-find-regexp, you won't get to tell exactly what you
> > want. So, the command needs to have some useful, clear semantics.
>
> It does.  With the etags backend, the TAGS file tells it to, and the
> user controls what goes into that file.  I presume other backends
> could do similar stuff.

That doesn't look general enough. What do I write in the docstring? 
"Searches where the TAGS files tell it to, or does similar stuff"?

> > xref-query-replace-in-matches will be the new name for the current
> > xref-query-replace. The changed name should signify that it replaces,
> > indeed, in the already-present list of matches.
> >
> > Since you said that having xref-query-replace called almost the same as
> > tags-query-replace is confusing.
>
> Ah, okay.  That'd be good, but we still should try to find a good xref
> replacement for tags-query-replace, IMO.

We should wait for more opinions, then. It won't be hard to add a 
command like that later.