Re: Subprojects in project.el

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 25/11/22 16:58, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> > I'll just mention that sub-projects have been haunting me for years in
> > Projectile, so you definitely will want to think long and hard about their
> > implementation as people tend to have all sorts of setups. Sometimes I even
> > wonder if it's worth it to try to support every use-case possible as it's
> > definitely a path of growing complexity and diminishing returns.
> Thanks for that background.  Personally, as a mere user of `project.el`
> I wonder about the meaning of "subproject".  Are we talking about two
> *separate*  projects that "happen" to be layed out in the filesystem in
> such a way that one is in a subdir of the other, or are we really
> talking about a situation where some project operations (but not all)
> will operate on "the project and its subprojects", which would then beg
> the question of how to decide which operations do that (and when).

Just to clarify how we got there: I only used the term "subprojects" to 
refer to the former, and only for the purpose of describing how one 
could implement a particular behavior: excluding subprojects' files from 
what 'project-files' returns for the parent project.

IOW, being able to make sure the projects are "disjoint", even if one is 
"inside" the other. And to get a performance bump from doing that, in 
certain cases.

And when the discussion got to the latter at one time (a more complex 
and open-ended topic), I asked to split that into a separate feature 
request via 'M-x report-emacs-bug'.