Re: auth-sources and EWW

[Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
>   > This goes back to one of my biggest complaints re custom; once
>   > something lands in there, it's well-nigh impossible to figure out what
>   > to pull out when something like this bites,
>
> What is the difficulty in doing that?
>
> If you know the name of the option, I'd expect it to be easy to find
> the code for the custom setting, and delete that if you wish to.  Why
> isn't this easy?

The problem is you don't always know the name of the option. There has
been many times I've seen custom variables 'appear' in my custom section
when I've not customized them. Once you know the name of the option and
your willing to ignore the warning about not editing the section by
hand, removing the option is trivial. However, when you don't know the
name or are even aware there is a value set there, it isn't so easy.

As an example, I use elfeed to read blogs. I use org-elfeed to manage
the list of blogs I read. Recently I edited this file to remove some
blogs and add others. Some time later, I happened to view my custom file
and was surprised to see a list of elfeed related blog urls in there. I
don't know why they were in there and they haven't appeared there on
other times when I've edited my org-elfeed file. I do recall that during
that session, I did customise a completely unrelated variable and
suspect this may have been what triggered these other values being
added, but that is just a guess. I deleted the elfeed custom settings,
but if I had not, I do wonder what would have happened the next time I
tried to manage my elfeed urls via the org-elfeed file.

-- 
Tim Cross