Re: Option to not automatically customize-save-variable `package-selected-packages'

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Joost Kremers <joostkremers@fastmail.fm>
> Cc: Artur Malabarba <bruce.connor.am@gmail.com>, johnw@gnu.org, angelo.graziosi@alice.it, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Thu, 18 Feb 2016 21:34:48 +0100
> 
> On Thu, Feb 18 2016, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
> > I see no fundamental difference
> > between saving the value of a defcustom and saving the list of
> > packages the user decided to install.
> 
> I think the main difference is that as a user, I can decide *not* to use
> Customize to set a particular defcustom. I can use a setq in my init
> file instead.

Can't you do the same with the list of installed packages?

> I can see the logic behind saving the list of user-installed packages in
> custom-set-variables, but IMHO the user should have the option of
> specifying a different location for saving this info.

Sorry, but I still don't see why.

You say that, for certain reasons, the customizations made by
package.el are "special", and due to that you'd like them to be
separate.  But how is this different from any other particular
customization that just happens to be special in some way?  I can
easily imagine a use case where it is inconvenient to have a
particular defcustom saved together with the others, for whatever
reasons.  And yet we don't provide any way of doing that, within the
framework of saving customizations via Custom.  In effect, we say to
such users: do it yourself in Lisp.  Which IMO is a reasonable
response, since users who have such special situations are most
probably capable enough to write their initializations in Lisp,
whereas Custom is for newbies who can't.

Why cannot the same reasoning be applied to the issue at hand?