Re: display-buffer change

[martin rudalics <rudalics@gmx.at>]

 > I have seen a change in Emacs 22.1 from Emacs 21 that broke my use of
 > dedicated windows.
 >
 > The problem is that (display-buffer buf) will change the contents of
 > the current window, if the other window in the frame has a dedicated
 > buffer.  In Emacs 21, a new window would be opened instead.

[...]

 > I use a dedicated small window at the bottom of my frame that always
 > contains the *compilation* buffer, and the new behaviour in Emacs 22
 > seriously lower the usability of a lots of command, such as viewing
 > diffs or showing source from gdb etc.
 >
 > I didn't find anything in NEWS that indicated that this was somehow
 > intentional.
 >

Please ignore if this has been already resolved.  You should be able to
handle this by customizing `split-height-threshold' to a reasonable
value (say 10).  Confer the doc-string of `display-buffer':

   If a full-width window on a splittable frame is available to display
   the buffer, it may be split, subject to the value of the variable
   `split-height-threshold'.

I didn't trace what caused the behavior to change from Emacs 21 to Emacs
22.  The Emacs 22 behavior is consistent with respect to the doc-strings
of `split-height-threshold' and `display-buffer' though.