Re: Subprojects in project.el

[Stefan Monnier]

>>> 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'.

I get the impression that the discussion is a it muddled by the lack of
distinction between the two, then (at least it wasn't clear to me which
part applied to which case).

I suggest we choose two different names for those two different cases.


        Stefan