RE: [emacs-wiki-discuss] Re: Autoloads

[Phillip Lord]

Michael Olson wrote:
> Jim Ottaway <address@hidden> writes:
> 
>> In the absence of the current style of pre-defined projects [i.e.,
>> specified somewhere such as ~/.emacs], the file extension would make
>> it much easier to determine that a configuration file should be
>> searched for.  Without a file extension, and without pre-defined
>> projects, I think working out that a configuration file should be
>> loaded for the file, and indeed that this was a muse file at all,
>> would be complicated. I think that is the relationship that the two
>> things share.
> 
> Yes, a file extension would make this easier.
> 
> Well, this isn't going to be one of my top priorities for the next
> major release of Muse (3.03).  Perhaps if the merging of nested-list
> support goes faster than I had anticipated, I would try implementing
> this before the release.   
> 
> I wonder if the JDE people would be interesting in having an
> abstracted project-file.el file made from their jde-project-file.el
> source.  

This has been mentioned on the JDEE list a number of times. There
are also a number of other people who have wanted to use such a
facility. 
But at the moment, no one has had the time to do it. 

It's worth asking. Paul's relatively open to this sort of thing, and it 
would be great functionality that would get wide use I think. 



> But first, before I implement anything, what sort of format should
> this file use?  Should it be automatically generated by a
> muse-project-file-write function?  Should people be able to customize
> it by hand easily?   


JDE uses a single autogenerated lisp form, which stores everything that 
has been Customized from the default. 

You can add other lisp forms into this file if you want, although, in 
practice, custom is usually enough. 

The big advantage of this is that it's very quick. At one stage the
speed
of project switching was a problem--if you were moving between different

buffers then the project has to reload, which makes speed of switching 
essential. This improved more recently, so it's less of a problem. 

Cheers

Phil