Re: RFC: Extensible Dependencies 'N' Actions

[Ian Dunn <dunni@gnu.org>]

Gergely Polonkai writes:

> • Some finders have missing documentation (although their names are pretty
> straightforward)

Yup, working on that.

> • Why the “new language”, why can’t it be lisp, or at least more lispish?

Initially, I made it similar to org-depend.el, but as parsing became
complicated, it has effectively morphed into lisp.  The keywords are all
symbols (they've got to be functions, after all), and the argument lists
are lisp lists.

I find this to be a good compromise between ease of coding for me, and
ease of understanding for the users.

> • You gave us a possibility to create naming clashes between targets,
> finders, etc. For example, I might want to file a note when a file of a
> project changes, so I use your file target, and create the file action. How
> will Edna know when to use which?

Right now, Edna will use the finder and ignore the action.  I didn't
want to force users to specify when to change from finders to actions or
conditions, so I just had Edna search for the functions.

Thinking about it, Guile uses the suffixes '!' to denote functions that
destructively change the input (like actions) and '?' to denote
predicates (like conditions).

If Edna looks for these characters at the end of the keyword (starting
character already means something), then that will allow users to name
both a finder and action 'file' (although the action would be 'file!').

And of course, thank you for your support and feedback.

-- 
Ian Dunn