Re: [PATCH] When deleting in bookmark menu, prompt for confirmation.

[Jim Porter <jporterbugs@gmail.com>]

On 5/3/2021 10:41 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> From: Karl Fogel <kfogel@red-bean.com>
>> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
>> Date: Mon, 03 May 2021 12:21:36 -0500
>>
>> Backward compatibility is a big deal in an API, but it's a much
>> smaller deal in an interactive interface behavior.  Yes, users
>> will be prompted in a place where they weren't prompted before,
>> but the prompt is self-explanatory, and the old behavior was
>> needlessly dangerous -- it's easy to type "x" accidentally and
>> lose bookmarks marked for deletion before one had finalized the
>> list.
> 
> Noted.  But we are not going to change the default behavior in
> incompatible ways on my watch, sorry.

Just a random musing: would there be any sense in adding a global option 
like `prefer-conservative-defaults' to Emacs 28 and mentioning it in the 
NEWS so that, come Emacs 29, developers could make modestly 
backwards-incompatible changes like this while keeping the old behavior 
for people with `prefer-conservative-defaults' set to t (which they 
hopefully set upon the release of Emacs 28)?

One downside I see right off the bat is that 
`prefer-conservative-defaults' == t would roughly mean "keep Emacs like 
it was in version 28", but a decade from now, someone might prefer Emacs 
38 and want conservative defaults starting then. I suppose 
`prefer-conservative-defaults' could specify a preferred version, and 
`defcustom' could allow for multiple default values defined by 
particular version ranges.

Either of these solutions would increase the maintenance burden somewhat 
for those variables (the second especially), but no one is *required* to 
make backwards-incompatible changes, so I'd hope this is only done when 
a developer truly believes that the new behavior is better, and is 
worried that existing users won't want to change.

This is somewhat academic for me, since I'm an existing user, and I 
always read the NEWS upon upgrading so I know what, if anything, I'd 
like to tweak. However, something like this could make it easier to 
improve Emacs in ways that would make it more attractive to a new user.

Like I said, it's just a thought...

- Jim