Re: xref and leaving "temporary" buffers open

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 07/25/2015 10:27 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> How is xref different from Grep or Gid in this regard?  Or from
> "M-x gdb", for that matter?  They leave behind buffers that have
> names like "*gid foobar*" and "*gdb myprog*", and never look back.

No, these are fine.

What I'm talking about, are file buffers that xref commands need to 
open, to read their contents. Such as xref-find-references; see, it can 
use Grep to find textual matches, but it cannot verify that the 
beginning and the end of the match are symbol boundaries without using 
the corresponding major mode, its syntax table, *and* its 
syntax-propertize-function. Basically, the only sane solution is to open 
each buffer and verify.

The question is, should they be killed afterwards.

> I see no reason why not.  Some commands already save the buffer
> (perhaps after asking for confirmation) to have the file on disk
> consistent with what Emacs has, and this is no different.

Hmm yes. I wonder if it'll be appropriate to simply call 
(auto-revert-handler) if each buffer visited for this purpose.

> > Certain other programs might have a project and all its files loaded,
> > but still display only a few of them as the ones the user is editing
> > (probably using tabs). Should Emacs have a similar distinction, between
> > loaded and open buffers?
>
> I'm not sure I understand how this distinction will come into play, or
> why is it relevant to the issue at hand.  Please elaborate.

Hopefully, this is clear now.