bug#12467: 24.1; customization initialization confusing

[Glenn Morris <rgm@gnu.org>]

Robert Horn wrote:

> I found a confusing behaviour for customization.  To trigger the
> behavior, assign a value of "t" to org-habit-show-all-today.  What I
> found is:
>
>  - If you start emacs and immediately go into *shell* and print org-habit-show-today-all you get an error because that variable has not yet been bound.

Customization only applies settings when relevant. Otherwise it would
have to unconditionally load at startup every package in which you have
customized an option. Use plain-old setq if you need different behaviour.

>   - If you start emacs and immediately go into options->config for
>   org-habit, the org-habit-show-today-all will indicate that it has
>   been set outside of the customization system when the customized
>   value is "t". When the customized value is "nil" there is no
>   indicated problem.

Sounds like a bug. However, there is no "org-habit-show-today-all"
variable in the Emacs trunk so I cannot test this. I cannot reproduce
this when customizing eg
org-export-html-table-use-header-tags-for-first-column.

> But a naive user would expect that starting the customization process
> for the group would also cause processing of the startup
> customization.

I don't really know what this means.