Re: unload-feature questions and thoughts

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

"Davis Herring" <herring@lanl.gov> writes:

> So I think that the evidence is for the intuitively obvious
> statement that no one knows how to use the hook.  I found no
> examples where the normal heuristics would break anything, although
> neither did I find any examples where the unload-hook actually broke
> things by suppressing the "normal heuristics".  So I think treating
> it as a bug is probably the right thing to do for simplicity: just
> do the heuristics regardless, and let the rare hooks that really
> need to suppress them kill the variable bound for that purpose.

Have you checked AUCTeX's loadup/startup sequence?  It uses the unload
hooks in order to offer a way of selectively disabling autoloaded
parts.  While the "no one knows" is somewhat accurate (it was a
combination of reverse engineering and trial and error to make me
understand the implications), it is likely not true that nothing will
break by changes in that area where external packages are concerned.

And it is mostly external packages that will use those kinds of hooks.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum