Re: Defcustoms, how do users find them?

[Juri Linkov <juri@jurta.org>]

> This defcustom is not autoloaded. How are users supposed to find it?
> Should all defcustoms be autoloaded?

Autoloading of defcustom causes problems with default values.
For autoloaded defcustoms the default is computed at the startup time
before loading .emacs and calling custom-set-variables where other variables
get their values that may be used for computing the default value of
the autoloaded defcustom.

Please see the related bug#4387 for more information:
http://emacsbugs.donarmstrong.com/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=4387

There is the following etc/TODO task:

  ** Remove unnecessary autoload cookies from defcustoms.
  This needs a bit of care, since often people have become used to
  expecting such variables to always be defined, eg when they modify
  things in their .emacs.

I'm not sure what does mean "This needs a bit of care"?
So I hesitate to remove the autoload cookie from `find-name-arg'
to fix the bug#4387.

PS: Removing the autoload cookie from `find-name-arg' also means
adding (require 'find-dired) to rgrep where it is used, but it seems
this is not a problem.

-- 
Juri Linkov
http://www.jurta.org/emacs/