Re: Managing environments (Python venv, guix environment, etc.)

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Stefan Monnier <address@hidden>
> Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2016 16:19:38 -0400
> 
> > The problem is that paths passed to find-file-name-handler, such as
> > default-directory, are not necessarily canonical paths.
> 
> Yes, that's indeed a problem.  In practice it tends to work OK, tho,
> because file and directory names to be constructed from each other, so
> even if there are many different ways to name a particular directory,
> there's typically only one that's used in a particular Emacs session.
> 
> And in any case it'd be good to fix the cases where we end up using
> different names for the same dir (because they end up bumping into
> similar problems).

Actually, I don't like to see any feature, let alone a core one, use
file-name-handler-alist for local files.  Lots of code in Emacs,
including primitives, really handle such files as remote, so the
results are likely to be incorrect and subtly broken.

> > OK, I'll wait until John expresses his thoughts. (Possibly after the
> > release?)
> 
> You might also contact the authors of python's virtualenv support (and
> anything else related) to get their opinions as supporting evidence for
> the benefits of your suggestion.

I always thought that features like this one should use and extent
the infrastructure in project.el.  And yet Dmitry is silent in this
discussion.  What am I missing?