Re: Tree-sitter introduction documentation

[Yuan Fu]

> On Dec 31, 2022, at 2:14 PM, Yuan Fu <casouri@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> On Dec 31, 2022, at 1:24 AM, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
>> 
>>> From: Yuan Fu <casouri@gmail.com>
>>> Date: Fri, 30 Dec 2022 16:03:42 -0800
>>> Cc: Philip Kaludercic <philipk@posteo.net>,
>>> monnier@iro.umontreal.ca,
>>> dgutov@yandex.ru,
>>> theophilusx@gmail.com,
>>> emacs-devel@gnu.org
>>> 
>>>> I don't think treesit-language-source-alist is a good idea, especially
>>>> if we don't intend populating it, at least not as a user-facing
>>>> feature.  Instead, the command should ask the user for the relevant
>>>> values, and offer recording the values on some file that would be read
>>>> next time the user wants to install an updated library.
>>> 
>>> I consider this as a fallback method for installing language grammars. 
>>> Because distress might not end up bundle language grammar for us, and even 
>>> if they do, they can’t cover every grammar so some user would end up 
>>> needing to install some grammar by themselves. If we don’t include this 
>>> feature, someone will definitely write something like this and make it a 
>>> third-party package (indeed, someone already has). So we might have it in 
>>> Emacs and do it right.
>>> 
>>> This is the use case that I had in mind when writing this function: some 
>>> major mode xxx-mode requires language grammar for xxx, so it has the 
>>> following instruction in its readme:
>>> 
>>> Add installation recipe of tree-sitter-xxx to your config, and run 
>>> treesit-install-language-grammar:
>>> 
>>> (add-to-list 'treesit-language-source-alist
>>>            '(xxx "https://github.com/xxx/tree-sitter-xxx.git";))
>> 
>> This is a user command, so it must comply to some minimal level of
>> usefulness and user-friendliness.  Right now, if you invoke the
>> command after just loading treesit.el, you will be stuck at the first
>> prompt, since Emacs says "No match" whatever language you try to type
>> at the front.
>> 
>> Why not allow the user to specify all the necessary data needed for a
>> language, if treesit-language-source-alist lacks those details for
>> that language?  You can then update the data structure with those
>> details.  Wouldn't this be much better and user-friendlier than asking
>> users to read the readme and fill a data structure (which some of them
>> could fill wrongly, not being Lisp programmers) in advance?
> 
> Makes sense, I can do that.

Done. Free feel to adjust the wording, etc.