Re: [Emacs-diffs] scratch/widen-less a4ba846: Replace prog-widen with consolidating widen calls

[Stefan Monnier]

>> To rephrase, don't widen in indent-line-function or
>> beginning-of-defun-function.
> This is an intolerable restriction.  The low level function mentioned
> above cannot, should not, must not know whether it's being called
> (indirectly) from indent-line-function or b-o-d-function.

It's a change.  So, to make it work right, some code will need to adapt.
As mentioned by Dmitry, this shouldn't introduce breakage in general:
the code will only need to adapt *if* it wants to work with
multi-major-mode solutions.  For the normal use case, you can still
widen/narrow to your heart's content and nobody will be the wiser.

There's nothing special here: any multi-major-mode solution will need to
define some convention/protocol that major need to follow in order to
work well.

Now if you worry that (after the code is adapted) the result is code
that is too complex/brittle, time will tell, but I get the impression
that it won't be too bad, likely no worse than any other solution.

The way your above situation would be handled is to say "the low level
function mentioned above assumes that the buffer has already been
properly widened".  This way, it doesn't need to know whether it's being
called (indirectly) from indent-line-function or b-o-d-function.

But some of its callers may need to be changed to do the widening, and
indeed, in order to know how far to widen, they'll need the help from
the multi-major-mode package.

So maybe we need something like:

    (defvar prog-widen-function #'widen)
    (defun prog-widen () (funcall prog-widen-function))

[ And maybe for the same reason, we need a function (rather than
  a variable) that returns the `first-column`, so we can get the info
  anywhere/anytime rather than only during indentation.  ]


        Stefan