Re: customize-apropos

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

Richard Stallman wrote:

       NO CUSTOMIZATION DATA; set this only if you know what you are doing.

   is better, because it avoids an overly broad interpretation of the
   warning.  There is no harm in using the customization buffer in any
   way except to set the variable.

Not quite.  Saving and especially various forms of resetting give more
problems that the (actually relatively problem free) setting for the
current session.  What else is there?

I now believe that a better string would be:

    NO CUSTOMIZATION DATA; not intended to be customized.

I believe that this best summarizes the two involved problems.

Setting, saving and resetting _to current_ work perfectly.  The two
only problems are:

Firstly, there are some problems with the other reset operations,
because of a lack of customization data.  The first part of the
message points that out.

Secondly, by using defvar instead of defcustom, a programmer indicates
his belief that setting this variable through Custom is not advisable,
either because he considers the variable to be internal (no * in
docstring) or because he believes that setting the default value (as
opposed to buffer local values) makes no sense (* in docstring, no
defcustom).  The second part of my new proposed message points that
out to the user.

I do not believe that there are any other problems.  (But these two,
especially the second, are bad enough.)

Sincerely,

Luc.