[O] Some Experiences with org-babel-load-file

[Florian Beck]

Hello!

As an experiment, I moved my .emacs and all my personal packages into an 
org-file and now load it with 'org-babel-load-file. This works fine 
enough: the source code blocks can handle several thousand lines of code 
(for later splitting) without any quirks, tough editing in the org-file 
sure gets slow.

A couple of observations:

1. `org-babel-load-file' doesn't seem to be in the org docu. The 
instructions on worg are obsolete (mentions `org-install') and 
needlessly complicated. Just putting

(package-initialize) ;; only if you use the newest org
(require 'ob-tangle)
(org-babel-load-file "/path/to/your/org-init-file.org")

into your .emacs (no need for .emacs.d/init.el) seems to suffice.

2. Unless you are only setting variables, you want your functions to be 
byte-compiled. I modified `org-babel-load-file' to do that. Any reason 
not to?

3. While it saves some keystrokes not to have to write "tangle: yes", it 
seems to be at odds with `org-tangle-file (though it does respect 
"tangle: no").

4. When I babel-load "my-package.org", all emacs sees is the tangled 
"my-package.el", which of course is right. The problem, however, is that 
I often search for one of my functions, change it … and loose the 
changes the next time I start emacs (I already got zapped a couple of 
times). Integrating org-tangle with the emacs documentation would be 
tough I guess. But how about setting a read-only file locale variable to 
block the most stupid mistakes?

Overall, very nice. Thank you.

--
Florian Beck