Re: M-. enhancements patch available

   From: Daniel Barlow <[email protected]>
   Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2002 16:41:52 +0100

   General advice for CVS branches :

   . . .

Thanks for the tutorial; I, for one, could certainly use it!

   The cvs reference I always use is the one whose URL I can never
   remember but which I always find by googling "loria cvs manual".  It's
   probably just the HTMLized Texinfo manual anyway, but IWFM

It does look like a version of the Info documentation, and it also
appears to be similar to what's in /usr/doc/cvs-1.10.5/cvs.ps on my
archaic Red Hat system.

   But it's not so much documentation I lack as real world advice, such
as, "Is back-porting patches really as much of a pain as it appears?"

   On the other hand, I am beginning to suspect that the hassle is
directly proportional to the number of actual patch conflicts, and not
the total volume of patches.  Since I am effectively adding a few files,
replacing nearly all of ilisp-src.el, and the changes to other files are
small, my concern is probably misplaced, eh?

   I haven't looked at the new M-. stuff yet, but I certainly plan to -
   it sounds very appealing.  I'm a big fan of edit-definitions anyway;
   if these changes make it work more often, I'm all for it.

   -dan

There are a few cases where it works better without the patch, and
that's why I don't want to dump this into everybody's lap (i.e. on HEAD)
before those are fixed (the ones I know about, anyway).  Overall,
though, the "hit rate" is noticeably better, especially for weirdo
things like defstruct accessors that aren't usually named explicitly at
the point of definition.  (And it's been a fun thing to hack on, almost
as much of an "instant gratification" sort of rush as interactive
graphics. ;-)

   Once this stuff gets used, there will be incentive to improve support
for it in free Lisps -- for instance, by adding the necessary source
file name recording so that you can find variables in CMUCL.  Ideally,
there ought to be a public-domain portable source file name recording
module that apps or Lisp implementations could just drop in . . .

   Dream on,

					-- Bob


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