RE: Settings

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

> > As a first principle, I think Emacs should not mess, at all, with the
> > ~/.emacs file.  That's for users to put their lovingly hand-crafted
> > setqs in.
> 
> I don't have a strong opinion on that, but I think it's important to
> realize that depending on the circumstances, the custom-set-variables
> call may have to come before some of the user's config as well as it
> may
> also have to come after some of the user's config.
> 
> IOW if Emacs just loads ~/.emacs.d/custom.el before ~/.emacs.d/emacs.el
> some things will break, and same thing if it swaps the order.

Definitely.  The doc should tell users that they
need to decide when/where in their init files to
load `custom-file'.

Sometimes it can even be preferable to load it
more than once, e.g., to pick up stuff from some
loaded libraries and then to let some later-loaded
libraries pick up stuff from `custom-file' (or
vice versa).

The most important point for users is that by
using `custom-file' they can prevent Customize
from fiddling with their init file, and they
can prevent accidental fiddling with Customize
settings when they edit their init file.

But a secondarily important point is that when
`custom-file' gets loaded can be important.