Re: Subprojects in project.el

[João Távora]

Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru> writes:

> But I'd be happy to find out that 98% of our users' cases can be
> handled with markers.

I think you'll begin to lose that bet right here in the Emacs repo.
Take the doc/ directory where Emacs's manuals live.  It's pretty
reasonable to consider a non-programmer (or non-Elisp) contributor
working on that directory almost exclusively, perhaps as a proof-reader.

That person would like C-x p f, C-x p g, etc to operate on the /doc
hierarchy almost always.  For example to escape the enormous amount of
grep matches in the Changelog files.  Occasionally, that person might
want to grep the super-project (Emacs itself) or run a compilation
command from there, but that would be infrequent.

Now, using marker files to mark doc/ as a subproject is not only
impossible (there are none) and also useless.

Marker files _are_ useful in e.g. large Javascript monorepos where a lot
of NPM packages live.  These are frequently added, removed, reshuffled.
There, looking for `package.json` to designate subprojects makes a lot
of sense, this is beyond question IMO.  But that doesn't make the case I
describe above an exotic exception in any way.

João