Re: help: adapting your library to new M-x compile

[Daniel Pfeiffer]

Saluton, Moin,

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> skribis:

>     - diff-mode.el:
> 
>     A cleanup is included in my compile.el.  The question is why this needs 
> compilation-minor-mode at all, only to override its commands?  Even though 
> the concepts don't quite fit, it might be interesting to derive diff-mode 
> from compilation-mode and let that do the parsing.
> 
>     - diff.el:
> 
>     This little library messes around in internal variables extensively.  
> IMHO it should be merged into diff-mode, as it offers little extra.
> 
> I would be glad if they were merged; it is ugly to have both.
> Would you like to do it?

Frankly, due to various unforeseen problems this has already taken a lot more 
time than I had bargained for.  I've invested two whole days off and endless 
hours of weekend stolen from my girlfriend.  I have other things sinfully 
neglected and want to get done with this.

Interesting task, if it were only for diff -c or -u.  Formats that don't show 
the filename are not directly useful with compile.  This would need a lot of 
exploring...  I'll gladly support Stefan if he wants to tackle this.

>     - progmodes/ada-mode.el: ada-compile-goto-error
> 
>     This apparently deals with multiple file-names to be found in one
>     message.  This is now handled by the default compile.
> 
>     - progmodes/ada-xref.el:
> 
>     Probably mostly works.  Special setup may required a derived
>     gnatfind-mode comparable to grep-mode.
> 
> It is good if these can be simplified.  We need to do the job, though,
> in order to install the new compile.el.

I need the help of Ada users as I don't know what that gnatfind stuff is good 
for.  So far noone has answered my appeals, so the way to awaken them is 
probably to provoke error reports from users.  They will then be willing to 
explain what they expect.  The libraries I possibly broke only concern a small 
minority of compile users after all.

>     - textmodes/tex-mode.el:
> 
>     Parsing classical TeX output is impossible to get right.  Make TeX
>     use -file-line-error-style or -c-style-errors with normal compile.
>     Making this work together with comint for interaction is under
>     study, and will be handled by my library.
> 
> It would be nice to improve TeX.  I will suggest that, but I don't
> know if it will happen.

No, no, these options are already there!  They give GNU style messages that are 
handled automatically by compile.

> Meanwhile, Emacs should handle the current
> TeX error messages at least as well as it did before.

I had asked around to find out when parens surround a file and when they are 
just parens.  Everybody said that's just about undecidable.  Stefan Monnier had 
written:

> The current parser in tex-mode.el fails so often (for me anyway) that
> I never use it.  I have worked on fixing it, but it's not ready for
> install yet.  Furthermore, my "better" tex-mode parsing is done in elisp,
> not via error-regexp-parsing.

Writing a matcher for that would be tricky and given the poor result to be 
expected, I'd say it's a waste of time.  Better make tex-mode ensure that one 
of these options be passed.

coralament / best Grötens / liebe Grüße / best regards / elkorajn salutojn
Daniel Pfeiffer

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