bug#43572: Feature request: make it possible to choose whether the first lines of the minibuffer should be displayed instead of the last ones

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Thu, 24 Sep 2020 16:40:58 +0000
> From: Gregory Heytings <ghe@sdf.org>
> cc: 43572@debbugs.gnu.org
> 
> > And in any case, we don't want to rely on luck in these matters, IME the 
> > Murphy laws are very strong here.
> 
> I can't believe this, in particular given that the default value of 
> enable-recursive-minibuffers is nil.

You again are thinking only about uses of mini-window for editing in
the minibuffer.  But that is not the only use of the mini-window.

And even in its use for the minibuffer, many users enable recursive
minibuffers.  I would not be surprised if some specialized modes and
packages enabled it for their operations.

> And in any case I'd say that it's to the third-party packages to
> adapt to changes in Emacs

If we break too many important packages, we will have bug reports
which we will be unable to ignore.  Emacs is expected to not break
third-party code too much too hard.

> > Can I convince you to try implementing this via text properties?
> 
> Of course you can.  But only if you promise you will not reject what I do.

If the implementation is clean, and doesn't present backward
compatibility problems, why would I want to reject it?