On Sep 19, 2010, at 3:39 PM, Joe Brenner wrote:

> (Of late, the gnus emacs team seems to be having trouble with the idea
> of stable interfaces.)


I don't think any of these have anything to do with gnus, but are definitely 
interface changes in emacs, potentially in the development trunk (i.e. the 
bleeding edge).

> One example I'm not sure about any more: I could swear emacs had
> suddenly switched to "typing-replaces-selection" behavior (standard on
> post-Macintosh interfaces perhaps, but never in emacs).  Now I don't
> think I'm seeing that behavior any more.

You would see this behavior if you were using the development trunk (i.e.
bzr HEAD) of emacs 24, unless you turned it off.  That interface is still
somewhat `under development' at the moment, so changes are expected.

Unless something changes, I would guess that ``typing replaces selection''
will be the default behavior in a future emacs release.  

> One that's been a minor annoyance to me is that repeated C-l's are no
> longer a no-op, but flip the display around in a new way that took some
> getting used to.

You might want to customize the variable recenter-positions to disable 
this new feature (which seems to have been introduced in Emacs 23.2).
I was quite pleasantly surprised to find it myself, as it more elegantly
solves a problem for which I'd long had a custom key binding.

There are very few changes to the emacs interface that aren't easily 
turned off.  If you're using the development head straight from the source
repository, you should expect to see these sort of changes now and then;
if such changes are unacceptable to you, then you probably shouldn't be
trying to use the active development code.  If you need some patch or bug
fix from the development HEAD but don't want to live on the bleeding edge,
I would suggest filling a bug report and asking if we can please put out a 
bug-fix release for your particular issue.

Hope that helps,
*Chad