Re: Stop fiddling with my preferences

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Sun, 23 Nov 2014 16:35:37 +0100 (CET)
> From: Roland Lutz <rlutz-ml@hedmen.org>
> 
> For the past few months, however, each time I upgraded to a new version of 
> Emacs, something in the behavior changed.

The time between Emacs releases is not measured in months,
unfortunately, but in years.

> I had to figure out each time what it was that caused the change and
> how to compensate for it.  This usually took me an hour or more
> since it isn't easily documented and most solutions suggested on the
> web have unwanted side-effects.

Changes in user-visible behavior are documented in etc/NEWS, together
with the description of how to get back old behavior.  If you find
some change that isn't documented like that, please report that as a
bug.

> This sort of behavior changes is common among browsers and proprietary 
> operating systems, but does this make it appropriate for Emacs?  One of 
> the reasons I'm using mature software is exactly that I *don't* have to be 
> worried with each new version that ESC won't stop playing animated GIFs 
> any more, etc.

We change user-visible behavior in response to user demand, not
because Emacs is immature.  User demands and expectations change with
time, and Emacs cannot stay with old defaults forever.

> How about a command like (use-defaults VERSION)?

From the menu bar, click Options->Customize Emacs->New Options, and
you will be able to see all the options that were added or changed
since some Emacs version.

> Also, I'd appreciate if the history of user-visible changes included the 
> commands necessary to restore the previous behavior.

We already do that, see above.  It should be in NEWS; if not, please
report as a bug.