require-final-newline

[Luc Teirlinck <teirllm@dms.auburn.edu>]

This is related with an issue discussed in another thread
(require-hard-newlines to use newline), but is more general.

In Emacs 21.3, Text mode did not override the default value of
require-final-newline.  In current CVS, it does via
mode-require-final-newline.  Is there a reason for that?  I can see a
reason for some specific derived modes, but these derived modes could
use mode-require-final-newline themselves, instead of letting the
parent mode do it for them.

Also, nil _is_ a valid value for mode-require-final-newline.  But the
docstring is not very explicit about that and you can not set it to
nil via Custom.  If you set it to nil outside Custom, Custom will
falsely describe the value as `ask', which is a bug.  Would it be good
to have the docstring mention this explicitly and allow it to be set
to nil via Custom with proper warning of the involved dangers (which
would fix the bug)?

Sincerely,

Luc.