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emacscollective / no-littering

Help keeping ~/.config/emacs clean
GNU General Public License v3.0
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prescient: Theme prescient-save-file #100

Closed akirak closed 5 years ago

akirak commented 5 years ago

This adds support for prescient.el written by @raxod502.

This seems to be the only file variable in the package.

raxod502 commented 5 years ago

So the default value of prescient-save-file is (expand-file-name "var/prescient-save.el" user-emacs-directory) already, because I think no-littering conventions are a good idea. This of course doesn't handle no-littering-var-directory. Is there an official recommendation for how I as a package author should conform to the conventions, so that code in no-littering isn't necessary? Or is the goal to have every package themed in no-littering, just for consistency?

akirak commented 5 years ago

The default value of no-littering-var-directory is (expand-file-name "var" user-emacs-directory), but the package allows the user to customize the variable. Then the location will be different. I customized the variable for no reason, but maybe I should revert it back to the default value.

Still, I don't want to put the etc directory in user-emacs-directory and will continue to alter the value of no-littering-etc-directory, so I wish to have variables of such packages themed in no-littering. This doesn't apply to prescient, since it doesn't have any etc files.

Or is the goal to have every package themed in no-littering, just for consistency?

It will be a neat idea for individual package developers to follow the conventions of no-littering so that the maintainer of this package won't have to theme variables in every package. Is there a former discussion on sharing the conventions among package developers?

akirak commented 5 years ago

I'll close this PR, since I don't have to get it merged any more. Thank you for the advice. If anyone is interested, please reopen the PR.

tarsius commented 5 years ago

Or is the goal to have every package themed in no-littering, just for consistency?

The long-time goal is that no-littering becomes unnecessary because Emacs itself provides the equivalent of no-littering-{etc,var}-directory and no-littering-expand-{etc,var}-file-name, and all built-in packages use these functions when appropriate.

I don't feel like pushing for such a change right now. If you want to help with this you could start thinking about how to convince the Emacs developers.

You could also think about the issues and benefits that arise if something like this is implement as part of Emacs. Would replacing locate-user-emacs-file with two functions be a good approach...

Is there an official recommendation for how I as a package author should conform to the conventions, so that code in no-littering isn't necessary?

I would recommend that you do not follow the no-littering-conventions by default. Users who like those conventions already use no-littering (assuming they know about it) and for those users that use your package but not no-littering following the convention just means that your package is yet another package that puts its file in some weird place.

In other words I think it is better if individual packages continue to dump their files directly in ~/.emacs.d because everyone else is doing that.

raxod502 commented 5 years ago

I don't feel like pushing for such a change right now.

I can imagine! It's such a pain :/

I would recommend that you do not follow the no-littering-conventions by default.

Ok, fair enough. I'll leave it as-is in prescient.el because the backwards compatibility would be complicated, but I'll follow your advice in future packages :)

In any case, thanks for your thoughts! Much appreciated.