Re: Faces for Mode Line and Mode Line Inactive

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

    ??? Look at faces.el, around line 1780, where these two faces are
    defined: mode-line-inactive inherits from mode-line only for terminals
    that don't support colors and/or :style attributes.  Otherwise,
    mode-line defines different colors and a released-button style.

I tried this under X, and found that it was as Lennart said:
mode-line-inactive inherits from mode-line and specifies no changes.

So I tried changing the defface of mode-line-inactive, putting
the t clause to the end.  Then customize-face showed the proper
values.

Maybe customize-face is not handling the choice of clause the same way
that defface does.  face-spec-choose seems to put the t attributes at
the end after the more specific attributes.  The result is that the t
attributes don't entirely override everything if they come first.

I get the impression that face-spec-choose is trying to avoid dependence
on the order of the alternatives, but not entirely succeeding.

For customize-face, it looks like the function that handles this is
custom-filter-face-spec.  I don't understand it, but I suspect it
disagrees with what face-spec-choose does.