Re: find-file-hook as illustration of Custom problems

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

Richard Stallman wrote:

   I don't think that minibuffer-prompt-properties is a problem.  It is
   simply a customizable variable whose value is set up with a setq.
   Likewise for help-event-list.  If there is a problem with these, it is
   only that they are built-in and handled by cus-start.el rather than
   a defcustom.  We just need to give them the right standard value.

   Do you want to try to do that?

If you mean removing the "Changed outside Custom" warning from those
rogue-at-startup (with emacs -q) variables that are really harmless,
then I could definitely do that way in time for Emacs 22 (old 21.4).

The way in which I would do that could be a temporary solution until a
more fundamental solution is implemented.  I could mention that in a
comment.

I might need to keep the "Changed outside Custom" warning for the two
hooks in the list.   I will need to take a closer look at that.

At a given moment we will have to implement the splitting of hooks and
probably other list vars into two parts which we discussed.  Until we
do that bugs in Custom will remain, but they are not new bugs.  These
bugs are serious, but the probability of users encountering them is
limited by the fact that the involved variables are not often used by
beginning users and are inconvenient to set through Custom anyway.  As
we get more hooks like `before-save-hook', by which the user can
enable two relatively popular features by a simple mouse click or
RETURN, the probability of users actually being inconvenienced by
those bugs will increase.  So we can not wait forever to fix them but
I believe we can (actually have to) wait until after the 22 release.

Getting rid of the bugs I described will require fundamental changes
in the Custom user interface.  Until we look at these problems
carefully and implement solutions, I would make as few changes to the
current Custom interface as possible.  I believe it would be bad to
have an oddball 22 Custom interface that would be very different from
both the 21 and the 23 interface.  People are used to the old
interface.  They should not have to adapt to non-trivial changes for
one single release (or *maybe* two releases, should 23 be released
very soon after 22).

We very definitely need to keep "Set outside Custom" until the bugs
are fixed.  Whether we still need it afterward depends on the
particular interface we wound up with.

Sincerely,

Luc.