We have a few questions dealing with different aspects of the "behind-the-scenes" of emacs:
- Are there any benefits of compiling Emacs with one graphical toolkit opposed to another?
- How is the GNU Emacs source code organized?
- What algorithm does sort use?
- What piece of code in Emacs makes `line-number-mode` print "??" as line number in buffers with long lines?
They all deal with different aspects of Emacs, but they all have that in common that they are asking about what is not presented to the user: compilation flags, source code organization or implementation of C built-ins.
This was already somewhat mentioned in this question: What should we do with the development tag?
However, I feel that our toolbox of tags is still insufficient. The first question of my list is tagged with compilation, which is inappropriate, and byte-compilation would only be slightly better. I am going to suggest the creation of emacs-compilation for this question.
But this tag (if accepted) will not host that many questions, and I think the questions above have really more in common than the 0 tags that they share (not that hard, eh? ^^).
Hence my suggestion/question: should we create a tag for this kind of questions, dealing with how emacs works behind the emacs-lisp?
Examples of topics belonging to that tag (including the ones above)
- compilation flags
- emacs source
- C built-ins (not how to use them, but what's inside)
- low-level dependencies
- differences between emacs builds (e.g. emacsw32 vs cygwin emacs)
If so, I suggest the name internals, because (imo) it speaks both to the expert and the newcomer, and it is the name that the manual uses. And it is less prone to errors than e.g. c-source-code would be.
Other suggestions could be emacs-core, emacs-source...
emacs-compilation
, I think maybebuilding-emacs
would be a better term. It's slightly more general (can include platform,make
, and build-script questions etc.), and it's generally the term used onemacs-devel@gnu.org
. Compilation is a big part of building, but it's not all of it.