Subject: bug#41572: 28.0.50; [PATCH] Support plain project marked with file .emacs-project

From: Dmitry Gutov <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2022 17:51:45 +0200

On 27/11/22 16:27, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> Better, but the last sentence above should say
> 
>    A directory containing such a marker file or a file matching a marker
>    pattern will be recognized as the root of a VC project.

Okay.

> (Btw, why "VC project"? can't I use marker files for non-VC projects?)

Yes, you can. That's what the docstring says: "can also be used for 
projects outside of VC repositories".

But "VC project" is a proper noun in this usage. Basically, a "VC 
project" is whatever value (if non-nil) that is returned by project-try-vc.

It's meaningful to have some proper noun for this, because this project 
type has customization variables, and it's handy to be able to use them 
for projects outside of VC repositories as well, recognized according to 
the new option.

Like the patch also says (and what's given me a pause in the past), that 
also makes "VC project" somewhat a misnomer. But I'm not sure what to 
call them better, and renaming a whole bunch of symbols creates a 
backward incompatibility after all. Even though, luckily, we've asked 
people not to rely on that object's internals.