Subject: Re: bug#19468: 25.0.50; UI inconveniences with M-.

From: Dmitry Gutov <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Apr 2015 20:22:14 +0300

On 04/29/2015 06:41 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> That's a UI inconvenience, IMO.  I already explained why: it requires
> me to know up front whether the symbol name I'm about to type is
> precise or not.

And I have already explained that it has advantages as well.

Interested users can rebind M-. to xref-find-apropos anyway.

>  We should not have "non-ideal" implementation that return radically
> different results.  Each query by default should yield approximately
> the same result.

I agree this should be improved.

> That kind of thing happens every day in Emacs development, IME.
> There's no way around it, if you care about some component, and
> another one gets in the way, you need to fix that other component.

Sure. Or sometimes, you just try to make it work well enough.

> I wasn't talking about the elis backend, I was talking about the
> design principles.

The implementation details of the Elisp backend have nothing to do with 
the other languages.

> No, it's a bug to be fixed.

People are welcome to work on that, but I don't see it work sufficiently 
well and user-friendly in all cases.

>> You can't use tags for non-core Elisp code anyway, such as anything in your init directory (installed packages, etc), and any Elisp files installed separately by the operating system's distribution.
>
> Of course I can use TAGS: I just need to load those additional tags
> tables.

First you have to collect the list of locations, generate TAGS at each 
of them, and then load them. While (okay) it is possible, it's not 
something we can ask the majority of users to perform.

>> Actually, if you're not working on a Git checkout, I don't think you can use the tags even for the Elisp code that's part of Emacs.
>
> Why not?  I do it all the time, and tried again just now: it works.

Okay, you can, if you find out where your distribution installed the 
Elisp files, go there, and generate the TAGS table.

Again, not something I'd ask the average user to do.