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

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Artur Malabarba <bruce.connor.am@gmail.com>
> Cc: johnw@gnu.org,  emacs-devel@gnu.org,  angelo.graziosi@alice.it
> Date: Thu, 18 Feb 2016 16:06:42 -0200
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> > I don't see why this should block the release.  It's a very old and
> > established behavior.  It's okay to discuss changing it, but blocking
> > the release due to it certainly doesn't sound TRT to me.
> 
> It's not yet part of a stable release, so if this variable is going to cease
> being a custom-variable I'd like to decide that before release.

It's a little too late for that, I'd say.

> OTOH, implementing this as a separate file is prone to introduce bugs,
> so I guess it would be a bad idea to introduce such functionality so
> close to release.

So what other options are there?

> > This seems to be a general complaint about package.el using Custom to
> > save the data about installed packages.  I see no arguments as to why
> > it's wrong to use Custom for that.
> 
> My reason is that Custom is bad for saving data that gets changed
> programatically (not just by the user).
> 
> > After all, Custom is our standard way of saving customizations,
> 
> The problem is that this is not strictly a customization.
> 
> The list of manually installed packages is more akin to the list of
> abbrevs, or to `desktop-save-mode's data. That is, it is data that
> gets programmatically changed by lisp code, without the user's knowledge.
> 
> Just like the abbrev and the desktop data are saved to their own files,
> I think the list of selected packages should too.

I seed your point, but I don't agree.  I see no fundamental difference
between saving the value of a defcustom and saving the list of
packages the user decided to install.