Re: Option to not automatically customize-save-variable `package-selected-packages'

[Artur Malabarba <bruce.connor.am@gmail.com>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

> I don't see why this should block the release.  It's a very old and
> established behavior.  It's okay to discuss changing it, but blocking
> the release due to it certainly doesn't sound TRT to me.

It's not yet part of a stable release, so if this variable is going to cease
being a custom-variable I'd like to decide that before release.

OTOH, implementing this as a separate file is prone to introduce bugs,
so I guess it would be a bad idea to introduce such functionality so
close to release.

>> > Perhaps the experts in this area have better reasons than we've
>> > heard so far.
>> 
>> IIRC, the discussions for this feature included me, Stefan, and Thierry Volpiatto (amongst other people).
>
> Can you point to those discussions?  If you mean this one:
>
>   http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-01/msg00756.html

That link looks right.

> then after reading it, I'm none the wiser: I don't see the issue with
> saving customizations in a separate file raised there.

It wasn't. I just mentioned who participated in the discussion of the
feature as a whole, I never said we weighted the pros and cons of using
custom-save-variable for the persistency.

> This seems to be a general complaint about package.el using Custom to
> save the data about installed packages.  I see no arguments as to why
> it's wrong to use Custom for that.

My reason is that Custom is bad for saving data that gets changed
programatically (not just by the user).

> After all, Custom is our standard way of saving customizations,

The problem is that this is not strictly a customization.

The list of manually installed packages is more akin to the list of
abbrevs, or to `desktop-save-mode's data. That is, it is data that
gets programmatically changed by lisp code, without the user's knowledge.

Just like the abbrev and the desktop data are saved to their own files,
I think the list of selected packages should too.