bug#49700: 27.2; [PATCH] Refactor minibuffer aborting

[miha--- via "Bug reports for GNU Emacs, the Swiss army knife of text editors" <bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>]

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Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: <miha@kamnitnik.top>
>> Cc: acm@muc.de, 49700@debbugs.gnu.org
>> Date: Fri, 23 Jul 2021 10:34:45 +0200
>> 
>> > I'd prefer not to expose minibuffer-alist to Lisp if it can be
>> > avoided.  This is a tricky area of Emacs, and exposing it to Lisp IMO
>> > gives Lisp programmers too much rope to hang themselves.
>> 
>> Well, the minibuffer list is already kind of exposed to lisp, try:
>> (seq-filter #'minibufferp (buffer-list))
>
> Then why did you need to introduce a new function?  It's fine with me
> to use the above if it does the job.
>

Yes, the above returns an unsorted list of minibuffers and I don't know
of any way to sort them according to depth.  minibuffer-alist would
return a sorted list.

>> minibuffer-alist returns a newly constructed list, similar to
>> buffer-list, so modifying the list structure is safe.  What could be
>> unsafe is modifying the minibuffers themselves, renaming or killing
>> them.
>
> Exactly.  And there are more atrocities that can be done with these
> buffers.
>
>> I believe that, since such actions are possible without the use
>> of minibuffer-alist
>> (for example, by evaluating (kill-buffer " *Minibuf-1")), they should
>> not mess up Emacs internals and it should be treated as a bug if they
>> do.
>
> I'd like to make that as difficult as possible.  When someone reports
> a bug, it could take some time and effort to discover that the code
> does something it shouldn't, and that eats up our precious resources.
> Also, if we expose the list of minibuffers explicitly, and with
> auxiliary information on top of that, it is hard to defend the
> position that Lisp programs should not do anything they want with that
> information.
>

OK, I understand.

>> > Is it feasible to make these changes without exposing the alist?
>> 
>> Yes it is feasible.  If the above didn't convince you, please send
>> another e-mail and I will try.  Thanks.
>
> Yes, please try, and thanks in advance.

OK, I will, but it might take about a week as I'm currently away.

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