Re: Defcustoms, how do users find them?

[Glenn Morris <rgm@gnu.org>]

Juri Linkov wrote:

>   ** Remove unnecessary autoload cookies from defcustoms.
>   This needs a bit of care, since often people have become used to
>   expecting such variables to always be defined, eg when they modify
>   things in their .emacs.
>
> I'm not sure what does mean "This needs a bit of care"?

I had in mind situations like bug#2150. Sometimes people have got used
to doing things like:

(setq foo-var (concat "more-foo\\|" foo-var))

or

(add-to-list 'foo-var "more-foo")

ie assuming foo-var is bound before foo-mode is loaded. There's no
compatible way to change such things to being non-autoloaded, nor is
there a way to warn "this won't be autoloaded in future".