Re: Mode-line face bug

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

    Another possibility is to stop the window manager from automatically
    setting a face resource for the mode-line.  There would then be no
    problem with the convention that X resources override Elisp, since X
    resources would be set by the user.

That is an interesting way of looking at it.  I have asked the GNOME
developers to turn off the setting for mode-line, for other reasons.
However, the theme manager also makes settings for other faces, such as
scroll-bar, so the problem would still exist.

It could be that the theme-based settings for other faces won't bother
many users, so few will try to override them by customization.
If so, the remaining problem would not bother people very much.
It would still be a problem, but less urgent.

However, that's academic, because even if the GNOME developers listen
to us, it will take a long time for corrected versions of GNOME to
replace the current ones.  So we need a fix for this now, even if we
won't need it badly 3 years from now.

Here is an idea.  When a face attribute is set by customization,
set a flag to record that fact.  That flag will cause the X resource
to be ignored for that attribute.

Do you agree that is feasible?  Can you implement it?