Re: master f51f963: Fix some side-effecting uses of make-text-button

["Basil L. Contovounesios" <contovob@tcd.ie>]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

>> As Paul said, not quite - it has historically modified its first
>> argument by placing properties on it.  If you look at the line preceding
>> this diff hunk you'll see a call to copy-sequence.
>>
>> My reasons for making this particular change are:
>> 0. Since Emacs 24.4, make-text-button has returned its modified first
>>    argument, so callers can use the value returned by make-text-button
>>    instead of calling it only for its side effects.
>> 1. This has now been reverted again, but for the last month,
>>    make-text-button returned a modified _copy_ of its argument, which
>>    meant that its side effects could no longer be relied upon.
>>
>> Either way, relying on its return value rather than its side effects
>> seems like the best style to stick with for now.
>
> So, IIUC `make-text-button` should ideally work functionally, but for
> historical reasons it works by side-effect.  What's the long term plan?
> Do we plan to live with the current side-effecting behavior, or do we
> plan to move to the "pure" functional behavior?
>
> If we could detect when a string-button is "used" (i.e. displayed or
> inserted into a buffer), then we could detect the use of the old
> side-effecting style (by checking if the string passed as argument had
> already been displayed/inserted elsewhere) and emit a good warning.

AFAIK all relevant future plans are being discussed in this thread:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2020-06/msg00117.html

For almost a month make-text-button was pure wrt strings, but that's now
been reverted again for backward compatibility and until a new decision
is reached.

-- 
Basil