Re: dired.el

[Luc Teirlinck <teirllm@dms.auburn.edu>]

Stefan Monnier wrote:

   We seem to miscommunicate: most let-bindings of buffer-read-only (99.9% of
   which are to nil) are due to people not knowing that they should bind
   inhibit-read-only to t instead.

Sorry, I somehow failed to notice that you were talking about a
different variable.  I was still thinking about buffer-read-only, even
though I might have written inhibit-read-only.

dired.el and dired-aux.el bind buffer-read-only to nil countless
times, but there is only one single inhibit-read-only binding in the
two files combined.  I have the impression that this is not a result
of "not knowing", but rather a result of the fact that the code is
old, probably from before inhibit-read-only existed.

Prolonged bindings of {buffer,inhibit}-read-only both have their own
dangers.  For buffer-read-only it is inappropriate mode line updates,
for inhibit-read-only it is the fact that it applies to all buffers,
including the minibuffer (unless one goes through the trouble of
making a buffer-local binding).  So one can not just blindly replace
either one by the other.

In the case of undo, I actually believe that _both_ are safe.

Sincerely,

Luc.