RE: Q on minibuffer-message

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

    > Imagine a scenario where you have no control over the
    > definition of `foo'. You simply want to use it, but not hear its
    > `minibuffer-message' noise.  Binding `minibuffer-message-timeout'
    > to 0 (or nil, or t, or whatever) should let you do that. That's all.

    You have defadvice, which is an official way of committing such crimes
    of uncleanness.

Someone gives you a command that has maybe 10 or 100 possible calls to
`minibuffer-message' sprinkled throughout its execution tree. You're going
to use `defadvice' to try to slice and dice away the message appearances? Or
you're going to rewrite the command, so that it uses a non-interactive
helper function or accepts a flag that controls message appearance or tests
whether it was called interactively?

The original author intended it only as an interactive command, but you see
that you can use its functionality as is - you just want to inhibit its
messages.

    In other words, you are asking for a mechanism to subvert the intent
    of the author of the function which calls `message'.

Yes. It's far from atypical to reuse something in a way that was not
foreseen by the original author. Probably most reuse fits that description.

In any case, `minibuffer-message-timeout' apparently has no effect
whatsoever currently: a 2-second delay is apparently hard-coded. When that
is fixed, one can hope that a setting of 0 seconds will inhibit display.
Some will then use 0 for that purpose; others will prefer more official ways
of committing such crimes of uncleanness ;-).