Re: assistants, again

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Tue, 19 Oct 2010 21:08:48 +0200 Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> wrote: 

LMI> Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com> writes:
>> I'll work on it.

LMI> Great!

Heh.  Maybe I'll get to it by Christmas.  Not the one in 2010.

>> I really need you to explain how assistants work, though.  Your parse,
>> render, and data assembly code makes sense when I read it but in
>> practice (writing actual .ast files) it's hard to use.  Plus it's not
>> obvious to me how to make assisted changes permanent: do I need to
>> write a converter or can assistant.el customize things directly?

LMI> I think you need to hook it into customize, probably, if I remember
LMI> correctly.  I meant to write that bit, but didn't get around to it.

OK.  Is it supposed to be hooked into one of the :get or :initialize
`defcustom' options?  I have never touched those areas.  The alternate
is to just use 'finish to directly set some variables so assistant.el is
standalone.

LMI> If the .ast file format is difficult to use, feel free to change the
LMI> format to something better.  I don't think this is used by anybody.

No, I mean it's like Lego blocks: I understand each piece but don't know
how to put together a big assembly.  The parser is fine, the format is
fine, but I need to see at least one complete example to do it.  It
doesn't have to be a full example, it can be just a variable with two
configuration paths: either it's a single choice of symbols or a list of
symbols or sublists (to show recursion).  So given the choices 'one,
'two, 'three, show me how to customize a variable to have these possible
values:

'one
nil
'(one two)
'((one two) (three))

...and make it permanent afterwards.

That will be most of what I need and I can figure out the rest.

Ted