Re: Tabulated list recenter issue

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Ian Dunn <dunni@gnu.org>
> Cc: Clément Pit-Claudel <cpitclaudel@gmail.com>,
>  emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Wed, 12 Apr 2017 21:10:33 -0400
> 
> If there are people that like the current behavior (obviously you're one
> of them), then I agree that my proposed changes should only be optional.

IME, after enough years have passed over a certain behavior, we have
no good ways of predicting whether someone or something out there
depend on it.  In our "arrogance" (pardon my French) we tried from
time to time to pretend that we do know, and changed the long-standing
behavior in backward-incompatible ways, only to discover later that
someone got hurt or that subtle hard-to-solve bugs emerged.

In general, I think it makes sense, in such a veteran package, to
always leave a "fire escape" for those who must have the old behavior,
as a matter of principle.  We should realize that we can no longer
change Emacs in arbitrary incompatible ways, not after 30-odd years of
history and many veteran users who have certain habits burnt into
their muscle memory.  We should make this part of our development
practice.

Thanks.