Re: Documentation for custom-file - is not (load custom-file) needed?

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

Richard Stallman wrote:

       If you just set `custom-file' with a setq in the user's init file, the
       :set and :get functions will not be called when the user's init file
       is loaded.  So you will have to insert calls to named functions in the
       user's init file that can be updated whenever Custom changes, without
       need to update the user's init file.

   I do not follow you here.  What calls do you mean?  Which functions
   do you mean?  What do you mean by "whenever Custom changes"?

The situation would be a much bigger mess than I thought when I wrote
the quote you are responding too.  The user _did_ customize
`custom-file' through Custom.  But we actually just wrote a setq form
into .emacs.  Should we now _consider_ `custom-file' to be customized
through Custom?  Since the user customized it through Custom, he
probably would believe that things that normally work when setting
things through Custom work for custom-file too.  But then you have to
set various properties like custom-saved and others.  (That would be
done by these named functions I referred to, which could be newly
written named functions.  If Custom started adding new properties to
the symbol-plist, which has happened in the past and may happen in the
future, these functions would need to be updated.)  But the situation
is worse than that.  If you do not set these properties, you get into
various anomalies, like the "State" message in a Custom buffer saying
that `custom-file' was changed outside Custom, which could confuse the
user.  If you do set them, you get other anomalies, because then
Custom believes that `custom-file' is defined in the custom file,
whereas it is not.  It is a mess and there is no need whatsoever to
get into that mess.

But I believe all of this is really a moot point, because I do not
believe that Custom should write anything into .emacs, unless it
actually allowed the user to specify different custom files for
different Emacs versions (because that is the main reason that the
custom file feature exists in the first place) and wrote a `cond' form
into .emacs.

Sincerely,

Luc.