Re: Custom Et Al: Build-Up The Underlying Platform was Re: A new user perspective about "Changes for emacs 28"

[Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com>]

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I largely agree with Raman's points. In particular, the problem of stuff
building up in the custom file (or section). To make it worse, the format
can be fragile, especially if you want to try and edit it to clean it up
(not a big issue if your an experienced elisper, but if your not....). I
have also experienced additional items being added to the custom section
when I have used custom to set some values. At odd times I've seen values
added which are not values I have customized.

It might also be worth having some sort of tool which could check custom
definitions. I frequently see warnings about custom value mismatches. These
are often caused when something is defined as a customizable value, but the
code has changed and updating the custom definition has not been updated to
match the code changes. Some sort of tool which check custom definitions
for completeness and alerted developers to definition and initialisation
mismatches might be useful.

Given the growth in custom usage, perhaps a better approach, rather than
the 'custom section' or custom file would be to have custom write
individual files into a ~/.emacs.d/custom directory? This could be based on
the custom group or package name or perhaps add an additional field to the
custom definition which specifies the name of the file to use. Emacs could
then look in this directory at some pint in the startup process and consume
the files in the custom directory or perhaps the require function could be
modified so that libraries/modules look for a corresponding custom file
when they are loaded? A big advantage of the individual files is that it is
easy to remove a configuration and it wold likely be less fragile than the
existing custom section. The drawback is that having lots of small custom
files might adversely impact init time (unless you can do something like
add it to require or load etc so that it is only read when the associated
code is actually loaded).

On Wed, 9 Sep 2020 at 13:52, Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> wrote:

> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
>   > For separating customizations into multiple files there is "initsplit"
>   > (https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/InitSplit). Maybe it's possible to
>   > include its functionality as part of Custom.
>
> I am sure we can implement the basic idea.  What I wonder about is,
> how to split the settings up?  Based on what sort of plan or system?
>
> If we have a clear answer for that, it should be a straightforward
> matter of doing work.
>
>
> --
> Dr Richard Stallman
> Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
> Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
> Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)
>
>
>
>

-- 
regards,

Tim

--
Tim Cross

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