Re: select-active-regions

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Sat, 18 Jul 2009 14:41:10 +0100
> From: David De La Harpe Golden <david@harpegolden.net>
> CC: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> In general, enabling select-active-regions at all on platforms that 
> don't have a true primary selection may not make an immense amount of 
> sense

Why not? they should put the region text into the clipboard instead,
IMO.

> I see your fix to lisp/term/pc-win.el , but it is not doing the right 
> thing as far as I can see (no way for me to test. Well
> I suppose I could install FreeDOS, but I'm not aware of a free w16 layer 
> for it).  If w16 has no OS-level concept of primary (I very much doubt 
> it does, though I can't say I'm familiar with it), then:
> 
> (x-set-selection 'PRIMARY value)
> ;should just stash value somewhere

What would be the purpose of stashing the value ``somewhere''?  The
NEWS entry says:

    *** If `select-active-regions' is t, setting the mark automatically
    makes the new region into the primary selection (for interaction with
    other window applications).

How can Emacs interact with other applications, if we just stash the
value in some internal variable?

How about if you explain (in more detail than available in the current
documentation) what this feature is supposed to do, and which
use-cases it is supposed to support?  Maybe then I will be able to see
why my code in pc-win.el is wrong.