Re: 23.0.50; Middle w in of permissions in dired-mode is red and bold: dired-warning

[Juri Linkov <juri@jurta.org>]

> It's your call, but at this late stage in the pretest, I'd advise
> against _any_ changes that are not strictly necessary for a functional
> Emacs.  Face appearance cannot be an obstacle to Emacs functionality,
> IMO, because it's all too easy to customize such a face.

But this will require for most users of dired to customize this face
immediately after seeing it, and always run Emacs with .emacs that
contains this customization.  This will be annoying for them.

> Now, Martin did his change for a reason, see the log entry above.  It
> looks like the change on the trunk by Juri simply reversed Martin's
> change (modulo face renaming), which means we are now back at the
> problem whereby world-writable files will not stand out on 8-color
> text terminals.  At the very least, we should take care of that
> original problem on the trunk.

No, your analysis is not correct.

This problem began with the following bug report:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnu-emacs/2007-08/msg00212.html

    Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2007 10:53:38 +1000
    To: bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
    From: trentbuck@gmail.com
    Subject: dired-warning face not colored on 8-color ttys

    The `dired-warning' face inherits from font-lock-comment-face.  Since
    Emacs 22, this face is no longer red on eight-color terminals, but
    rather is the same colour as normal text.  This effectively means that
    the user cannot see warnings.

    I submit that dired-warning should inherit from
    font-lock-comment-delimiter-face.  Probably this change should be made
    to a number of other faces that inherit from font-lock-comment-face.

My change fixed this original problem by inheriting from
font-lock-comment-delimiter-face instead of font-lock-comment-face.
So we can say that the original problem is fixed now on the trunk.

During the discussion about fixing this problem, it was proposed to try
inheriting from font-lock-warning-face.  This change was unnecessary to
fix the original problem, and was accompanied by numerous doubts:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2007-09/msg00436.html
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2007-10/msg00756.html

After this experimental change was installed, it caused complaints:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2007-10/msg00724.html

Now we have a situation the very opposite to what it has to be:
the trunk contains a fix for the reported bug, and the 22 branch
contains an experimental incompatible change.

I think the most reasonable and safest thing to do now on the
branch is to install the original bug fix that changes the
parent of the dired-warning face from font-lock-comment-face
to font-lock-comment-delimiter-face.

-- 
Juri Linkov
http://www.jurta.org/emacs/