RE: can't set both mode-line color and default frame font?

["Drew Adams" <drew.adams@oracle.com>]

> > I'm not necessarily arguing against such a rule, but your supporting
> > reason for it is...?
>
> It belongs to no one but me, but my supporting reason is that Emacs is
> much more intelligent than other configuration systems.  If need be, one
> can base a color scheme on a traveling salesman solution for your
> preferred colors and the system defaults, or whatever else.  True, Custom
> can't make this easy for you (perhaps, for common cases like "different on
> different hostnames", the idea of composable custom files could be made to
> work), but .Xdefaults can't do it at all.

OK, but that argues that .emacs or `custom-file' is generally a better place
to customize than X resources, because it is more flexible/powerful. I'm not
sure that argument speaks to the question of precedence when multiple
customization sources are employed. It is not uncommon to have a less
flexible decision mechanism assume higher precedence/priority.

I'm just trying to flush out the reasons here, so we can understand the
issues better. I have no real opinion (yet) on how such customization
conflicts should be handled. On the face of it, it sounds good to me that
`custom-file' should take precedence, but I'm not sure why it sounds good to
me ;-).