Re: Package initialization

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org> writes:

> Stefan Monnier writes:
>
>  > >> The important aspect is that it should be possible to install a package
>  > >> without using it, so the autoloads file should only set things up so
>  > >> that they *can* be used, but not so that they're automatically used
>  > >> without being explicitly requested.
> [...]
>  > > It also seems to me that there is a certain conflict between what you
>  > > say and this from the manual:
>  > 
>  > >   These autoload definitions are saved to a file named
>  > >   ‘NAME-autoloads.el’ in the content directory.  They are typically used
>  > >   to autoload the principal user commands defined in the package, but
>  > >   they can also perform other tasks, such as adding an element to
>  > >   ‘auto-mode-alist’.
>  > 
>  > I don't see a conflict there.  Opening a file with the particular
>  > extension counts as an "explicit request".
>
> For a major mode, usually[1], for a minor mode (as slime-mode is),
> rarely[2].  IMHO YMMV etc.
>
> Footnotes: 
> [1]  Unfortunately overloaded extensions are hardly uncommon.

Or overloaded modes.  AUCTeX provides major modes different from the
default TeX major modes.  When it is activated system-wide, it provides
an easy customization of modes it should keep its fingers off, and
without further configuration it does not activate its extensive
information parsing and caching so that people without interest in TeX
for which TeX-mode gets triggered when browsing directories do not get
unexpected delays or files lying around.

That's a heavy load of compromises.  I can't remember when we had the
last complaint that AUCTeX was doing something the user did not expect
(in general, plain TeX users don't get reasonable value from AUCTeX and
don't care for "fancy" anyway, but it's been long since the last one
asked how to turn it off).  We do get occasional complaints that AUCTeX
is doing less than the user expects (pointing to the first page of the
manual helps).  So it would seem that we are rather erring on the
conservative side.

-- 
David Kastrup