• State "PROPOSED" from "" 2010-07-29 Thu 21:33

Dan Davison <davison@stats.ox.ac.uk> writes:

> Hi Eric, > > I'd like to revisit the discussion that we had before about the > possibility of having src blocks in which the code is not actually > embedded in an org file. > > This is the only major obstacle I've encountered in using babel: what > started off as a project with tangled babel src blocks ended up as a > traditional non-babel project: the babel part died completely.

I've had similar issues, and see some more on the horizon.

> The reason was that some of the collaborators were non babel users, > and we needed a way for changes to the code to be propagated in all > directions among the authors. We were using git, and a related point > is that I am attracted to tracking code changes and org text changes > separately in my VCS (e.g. as would be done automatically if they > resided in separate files) > > The thread from the list discussion we had is > > http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.orgmode/24431 > > Do you have any updated thoughts on this topic? Is it relevant to babel?

I think that a general "remote block" solution would be best, maybe even a solution which allows remote tables (would include radio tables).

> > Should we be thinking in terms of org blocks or org links or both or > neither?? >

I'm not sure what the best implementation system would be. I'd check what the radio table implementation uses. Currently there is some minimal support for relating source code sections to org-mode documents through comments, however special comment insertion may not always be possible (thinking legacy code, or large projects). So ideally the solution should require no org-specific markup in the source files.

Definitely a challenging problem – I wonder if there is existing similar Emacs support for maintaining remote references to sections of files (e.g. TAGS).

Best – Eric

> > Dan