On Mon, Aug 28, 2023 at 1:05 PM Eli Zaretskii <
eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
You will have to present a more detailed proposal, because up front I
don't see how will this work.
Entirely fair; I was presenting a pretty rough sketch. Let me try to make it more concrete.
What I had in mind was something akin to autoload that, rather than providing _any_ clojure mode (in this specific example), instead provides the user with a buffer conveying that Clojure support in emacs is available, but is not currently bundled directly, and offers the user a short description of each of the two packages clojure-mode and clojure-ts-mode, along with buttons to install and activate each package.
Thus, if a new user started a freshly downloaded emacs, they would find some guidance (rather than, for example, "[No match]" from M-x or fundamental-mode from opening test.clj), and we could provide some short info backed by the full package description in cases where there was no current always-recommend. The message/guidance could be conceptually similar to the disable-command machinery.
I had autoload in mind based on the idea that this guidance code would be supplanted by an actually installed package (and, I think, ideally restored if the package was later removed). In other words, I'm suggesting adding an optional dispatching step for the paths most likely to invoke a not-directly-supported-in-core language.
Perhaps *eventually* something similar could be done for suggesting say, c-sharp-ts-mode and cc-mode for a fresh emacs and "C-x C-f test.cs". I imagine that there are refinements that could be useful for someone who wanted to try assembling a small-core emacs, but I'd be surprised if there weren't important lessons to learn before that point.
I hope this description is clearer; please let me know if I missed or forgot anything important.
~Chad