users and selection changes [was: Custom themes]

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

>> The color-adjustment themes are "look" themes rather than "feel"
>> themes... I had been looking at the customisation theme
>> mechanism as a way to encapsulate old vs. new selection settings
>
> I'm not sure this is workable.  A big motivator for the selection
> changes was to simplify the code in mouse.el by removing the
> special-casing of mouse selections.  Providing complete backward
> compatibility, even as an option, would necessitate putting all the
> cruft back in, which mostly defeats the purpose.

Hm.  We were told several times that users _would_ be able to get back exactly
the pre-Emacs 24 selection behavior (at least on Windows, and I thought
everywhere), and that we just had to wait patiently until the "wrinkles" were
"ironed" out and we would be told how.

Now you seem to be saying "Ha! we didn't really mean it; you can't get back the
old behavior after all. Users are lusers."

Removing bad code, with crufty special-casing, is one thing - a good thing.
That isn't necessarily user-visible anyway - it's essentially code cleanup or
optimization.

Changing user-visible behavior is something else.  And changing it in ways that
are irreversible, that don't give users the choice to get back the old behavior,
is something else again.  And it's not what was advertised.

If some of the code removed was _required_ for the previous (user-visible)
behavior, then that part of what was removed was not "cruft".

And there is still nothing in NEWS that describes these changes in a user-usable
way, including which variables and functions have changed interfaces and how,
and how to get back the previous behavior in each respect where that is
possible.  Listing incompatible changes is part of this: what you cannot do that
you used to be able to do, etc.  (See, for example, NEWS bugs #7196, #7195.)