Re: Defcustoms, how do users find them?

[Juri Linkov <juri@jurta.org>]

>>   ** 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"?
>
> I had in mind situations like bug#2150. Sometimes people have got used
> to doing things like:
>
> (setq foo-var (concat "more-foo\\|" foo-var))
>
> or
>
> (add-to-list 'foo-var "more-foo")
>
> ie assuming foo-var is bound before foo-mode is loaded. There's no
> compatible way to change such things to being non-autoloaded, nor is
> there a way to warn "this won't be autoloaded in future".

So there is "no way back" and removing autoload will cause another
bug report about failures in ~/.emacs that customizes that option.
Then I don't how to fix bugs like bug#4387.

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