Re: remember(-diary).el

["Lennart Borgman (gmail)" <lennart.borgman@gmail.com>]

Michael Olson wrote:
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> 
>>> From: Michael Olson <mwolson@gnu.org>
>>> I want to be able to pop up a warning window upon loading a file
>>> (this window can be disabled by the user) which tells people of the
>>> issue, and which registry key to change in order for it not to be a
>>> problem anymore.
>> That's be harassing the user, a very un-Emacsy thing to do, IMO.
> 
> I don't think of it as harassing the user -- if something has
> nondeterministic behavior whenever its source code gets checked out, I
> want to warn people about it.  Obviously the message that appears would
> need to be invective-free and informative.  And since it appears during
> load, it needs to contain instructions for how to disable the display of
> the message.


One may feel differently about this, but for me it sounds like the right 
thing to do in a case like this. It is however very important that the 
message is (very) easy to turn off - and that the information in the 
message is easy to find again.

Actually I believe that this way of handling the problem is what 
computer users expects today. However I also agree with Eli that it 
could be harassing the user. It must be used with caution.

I have tried to avoid this as much as possible (though I felt a bit 
differently in the beginning). In one important case I use it now. It is 
for a package where you do not get the full benefit of it unless you 
turn on some things that may influence Emacs outside of that package 
too. I then inform the user of that this way, using display-buffer to 
show the message and from there the user can turn on those things or 
just choose not to see the message any more.