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

[Gregory Heytings via "Bug reports for GNU Emacs, the Swiss army knife of text editors" <bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>]

>> This seems to be a really minor problem.  What kind of problems could 
>> happen because during a recursive edit while icomplete or ido or ... is 
>> active, redisplay is asked to start displaying at BOB?  Do you really 
>> believe this could lead to a non-minor problem?
>
> Yes.  There are third-party packages out there that do unimaginable 
> things when the user is prompted to enter his/her choice of something.
>
> 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.  And in any case I'd say that it's to 
the third-party packages to adapt to changes in Emacs (and I'm sure from 
time to time there are changes here and there that force them to adapt 
their code).

>> Then I wonder why this did not happen earlier (and wonder when it will 
>> happen).  A bug report about this exact problem has already been filed 
>> five years ago (bug#24293).  Five years ago.  And the patch I'm 
>> proposing is less than ten lines long, and would be most welcome today.
>
> It didn't happen for the usual reasons: no one felt motivated enough to 
> sit down and do it.
>
> 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.

>
> The code will be very simple, I promise.
>

In fact, that's not motivating ;-)

>
> And we are here to help if you are unsure how to go about that.
>

Thank you, that's good to know.