On 28 November 2017 at 22:12, Philippe Vaucher <philippe.vaucher@gmail.com>
wrote:

>
>> Note that as long as the `setq` is within the magical
>> custom-autogenerated-user-settings form, it will behave correctly even
>> if the variable has a setter function.  The difference will only affect
>> those users who take this code and then copy it elsewhere.
>>
>>
>> But setq doesn't have any concrete benefit other than familiarity to
>> people who don't understand custom. I've spent more time than I wish on
>> Freenode #emacs teaching people about custom. If c-s-v was used
>> consistently that effort would be made a lot easier.
>>
>
> The problem I have with c-s-v is that I don't see its benefits for configs
> like this:
>
>
[ lines of ‘setq’ invocations on ido variables ]

Can you maybe enlighten me about what problem c-s-v solves that would have
> me start to use it?
>

Your explicit ‘setq’ calls are perfectly fine as long as the variables you
set do not have a setting function
assigned to them. However, if they do have setter functions, then the
behaviour will not be correct.
It has been suggested that you manually look at the ‘defcustom’ definitions
of the variables so that
you know which ones doesn't work with ‘setq’.

The only reason people can get away with not doing this is because there
are so few custom variables
that use setter functions.

Thus, if you use ‘setq’ instead of ‘custom-set-variable’ you need to
manually check every single
variable to ensure they don't have setter functions assigned. If you want
to be thorough (nobody is)
you also need to check them every time your modules are updated. This is
not just a theoretical
situation. It happened in gnu-apl-mode, a library for which I am the
maintainer. In it, the
variable ‘gnu-apl-mode-map-prefix’ got a setter function after the fact.

Or, you could simply use ‘custom-set-variable’ everywhere and spare
yourself the trouble.

Regards,
Elias