Re: Comparison of tools to search for related files

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Damien Cassou <damien@cassou.me>
> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>, Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>
> Date: Mon, 05 Sep 2022 22:51:29 +0200
> 
> I'm implementing jumprel to jump from a file to related files (e.g., its
> tests, its CSS, its .h header file…). During discussion for bug#57564,
> Eli asked me
> 
>       How will this be different from what we already have:
> 
>       • the find-file.el package
>       • the new command 'find-sibling-file'
> 
> I didn't know about these 2 packages so thank you very much for telling
> me about them. Because I just learned about them, my description and
> comparison below might be incomplete.
> 
> In the following I will compare the packages according to my 2 use
> cases:

[...]

Thank you for the details and the summaries.

My point in mentioning the existing features is that from where I
stand, it is much better to extend existing features rather than to
introduce a completely separate package with a different
implementation.  I think having several different overlapping features
in core is not good for maintenance.  I was even unhappy when Lars
introduced find-sibling-file, which IMO could have been implemented on
top of find-file.el with some extensions.

So the fact that neither of the 2 existing features fits your use case
doesn't invalidate what I was trying to convey.  I didn't claim that
one or both of the existing features already support your needs, I
wanted to urge you to consider how one of them could be extended to
cover your use cases.  AFAIU, the question whether such extensions are
reasonably practical and will yield convenient solutions -- that
question still stands.

Thanks.