Subject: Re: bug#54962: 28.1; insert-directory-program should be ls-program

From: Howard Melman <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Apr 2022 17:35:38 -0400

> On Apr 15, 2022, at 4:16 PM, Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> I've now added a reference to insert-directory-program in the doc
> string of Dired, and vice versa.  I think this addresses the problems
> you had in finding the variable.

Yes that helps.  

> The distinction is that there's only one program that can be used in
> the other examples of these variables, and the variable exists only to
> support different installation directories for that program, and
> sometimes popular renames like 'gfind' instead of 'find'.  

This is exactly my case.

> That's not the case with 'ls'.  Some systems call this 'dir', for example.

I don't see why that system couldn't just as easily do

    (setq ls-program "dir")

On the mac I configure locate-command to use mdfind, which seems
similar.

> Besides, insert-directory-program is used not just by dired, it is
> also used by a function names 'insert-directory'.

Which I think is just used by dired and list-directory the latter
of which says in the first line of its docstring:

    Display a list of files in or matching DIRNAME, a la ls.

And there's ls-lisp-use-insert-directory-program which is also very 
ls centric.

So I still don't get your distinction and think a variable alias would
break nothing and help findability.  

In my case I changed my system configuration and knew I had to
tell emacs about "gls" and knew about setting grep-program and
find-program and locate-command and thought this one would be
called ls-program in part because those others weren't called
something like search-files-for-regexp-program.

Howard