Subject: Re: bug#68958: [PATCH] Support bookmarking Xref results buffers

From: Eshel Yaron <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2024 22:49:26 +0100

Dmitry Gutov <[email-masked]> writes:

> On 13/02/2024 09:10, Eshel Yaron wrote:
>> Dmitry Gutov <[email-masked]> writes:
>>
>>> Otherwise, the requirements on the arguments are the same (fetcher --
>>> named function, args -- printability).
>> That might work, although it seems rather difficult to explain such
>> requirements, and it's difficult for callers to ensure or even check
>> whether they're kept (how do you know if your argument is too big
>> without printing it in advance?)
>
> You can usually track that on the level of user input. A good rule of
> thumb would be not to pass a generated list of files. And if some
> user's interactive input string is veeeeeery long, well, whatever disk
> space is wasted as a result is their own doing.

I agree, that's a good heuristic.

> What's the alternative, though? Writing a separate bookmark storage
> function for every sort of search? For project, lsp-mode/eglot (they
> both have additional commands doing extra searches), etc?

I think we should have an extensible interface that covers the Xref
commands by default, and allows other callers of `xref-show-xrefs` to
override the default to suite their needs.

> And the return value of xref-backend-context (from your proposal) must
> likewise be print-able and compact enough, right?

Yes, you're right.  By default, in my proposal, the return value of this
method is itself a bookmark record (pointing to the position where you
initiate the search), so we rely on the major mode of the original
buffer to define a reasonable `bookmark-make-record-function`.  If a
backend overrides the default method, it also needs to take into account
these limitations, indeed.

>> Furthermore, IIUC, what you get is an opaque function and argument list,
>> and the frontend cannot reason about these, it can only apply the
>> function to these arguments to get a list of xrefs.  In contrast,
>> xref-fetcher-alist provides clear (documented) semantics.
>
> Which will only work for Xref's own commands but not for any external
> callers of xref-show-xrefs. Right?

It doesn't work out of the box for external callers, but it isn't
strictly restricted to Xref commands either: it works for any caller of
`xref-show-xrefs` that defines a (possibly trivial) Xref backend, and
passes a fetcher function that sets `xref-fetcher-alist`.
`xref-make-fetcher` is supposed to make it easier to create the such a
fetcher function.

>> We use it for
>> bookmarking first and foremost, but the frontend can legitimately use it
>> for other stuff too, like showing some info in the mode line.
>>
>>> Also, I'm not sure how we're supposed to guarantee that
>>> xref--original-buffer is live.
>> In my patch, we don't guarantee that (see
>> xref-bookmark-make-record).
>> And that's fine, it's a best effort to give the backend all the context
>> it might need.  If there's no original buffer, we just don't save and
>> restore that bit of context.
>
> Okay, I see that. Basically, you bookmark the "original point" and
> then restore it from xref-backend-restore. So this would work, most of
> the time.
>
>> The backend can handle a nil CONTEXT
>> argument in xref-backend-restore however it sees fit.  By default, it
>> does nothing.
>
> I don't any LSP backend could handle nil, though. It would need
> additional data, like the origin file name, the value of point, etc.

Right.  For Eglot, we cannot restore a bookmark with nil context, and we
also need to make sure we're connected to the server.  Adding something
like the following in eglot.el seems to do the trick:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
(cl-defmethod xref-backend-restore ((_backend (eql eglot)) context)
  (unless context
    (error "No context available for restoring Xref search"))
  (bookmark-handle-bookmark context)
  (unless eglot--managed-mode
    (apply #'eglot--connect (eglot--guess-contact))))
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---