Re: Navigating an enormous code base

[Marcus Harnisch]

On 28/04/2022 00.59, John Yates wrote:
> Start with feeding a completion interface:
>
> * Do you index on demand?  If no, then when?  And how do you
>    keep the index upto date?

As far as my work pattern with Global/ggtags is concerned, I create a 
full index rarely. Usually only when the repository can be expected to 
have changed significantly (pull, merge with upstream, etc).

Global can do single-file updates, which I think ggtags executes in 
‘after-save-hook’ or something, so your own changes will be tracked. 
Creating the database with the sqlite3 backend is supposed to perform 
much better with these partial updates.

Since I spend most of my time in my little niche this is sufficient for 
my purposes and even if there have been small updates outside, the 
location I will be taken to is close enough most of the time (and a 
little reminder for creating a full index).

> * Indexing the entire workspace will result in an intractably
>    large index.  So how do you partition it?

I don't bother and don't partition the project (comprising of 10k files, 
and 50+ nested subprojects)

The total size of the DBs is about 60MB (files: 2, tags: 20, references: 
38).

> * Is the user restricted to querying a single partition of the
>    index?  If yes, then that feels painfully restrictive.  If no,
>    how does that user indicate which partition indices to combine?
>    How is combining accomplished?

See above.

> * How are duplicate filenames handled?

By storing path names.

Why don't you give it a whirl and see whether this suits you?