Subject: Re: bug#67018: [PATCH] Add autoload cookie to vc-git-grep

From: Dmitry Gutov <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 9 Nov 2023 21:34:12 +0200

On 09/11/2023 17:13, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> From: Alyssa Ross<[email-masked]>
>> Cc:[email-masked]
>> Date: Thu, 09 Nov 2023 16:05:32 +0100
>>
>> Eli Zaretskii<[email-masked]>  writes:
>>
>>>> +;;;###autoload
>>>>   (defun vc-git-grep (regexp &optional files dir)
>>>>     "Run git grep, searching for REGEXP in FILES in directory DIR.
>>>>   The search is limited to file names matching shell pattern FILES.
>>> Thanks, but please explain the motivation.  Which package needs to
>>> autoload this function and why?
>> Often running M-x vc-git-grep is the first thing I do after starting
>> Emacs.  I think it would be good if it was autoloaded, so I didn't have
>> to M-x load-library vc-git first, or try to set up autoloading just for
>> myself in my Emacs configuration.
> By the same token we should autoload every command in every Lisp
> package we have?  Because there are a lot of commands that are not
> autoloaded, and you need to load their package to have them available.
> I wonder what Dmitry and Stefan (both of them) think about this.

A lot of commands don't make sense outside of major or minor mode, so we 
only have to autoload the modes in those cases.

If 'vc-git-grep' is an independent entry point, it should make sense to 
autoload it. I suppose vc-git is not loaded at the beginning of the 
session because no [Git-controlled] file has been visited yet.

I think I'd also like to advertise 'project-find-regexp' (bound to 'C-x 
p g'). Just in case Alyssa was not aware of it.