Re: Fixing post-self-insert-hook.

[Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>]

Hello, Eli.

On Sat, Sep 18, 2021 at 08:59:54 +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > Date: Fri, 17 Sep 2021 20:35:50 +0000
> > From: Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>
> > Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org

> > The point is, these calls are currently undefined.  Pretty much every
> > last one of them, apart from the ones in cc-cmds.el, which have been
> > made defined again.

> > These 111 calls might have been working, they might not, they might have
> > sort of been working as long as electric-pair-mode isn't enabled.  Who
> > knows?  They're currently in a sort of race condition.

> If they aren't working, where are the bug reports about that?

They don't work, at least some of them.  That is evident from examining
the source code and mechanisms involved.  As for bug reports, there are
many thousand open ones which Lars is heroically working through, some
of which don't have obvious causes.

> We only have bug reports about CC mode so far.

The bugs are, however, not in CC Mode and can't be fixed there.  They
can only be worked around, which is what has been done since bug #33794
at the end of 2018.  This workaround is ugly and caused bad feeling at
the time.

> > So, yes, you're basically right.  We should move the call to p-s-i-h not
> > just to fix the interface to electric-pair-mode and friends, but to
> > bring sanity back to Emacs with respect to this matter.

> I'm against such changes, as you well know.

Indeed!  I can only respect that whilst disagreeing strongly with it.
I've never been a fan of "it mostly works, so don't touch it!".

> With Emacs, "sane" is mostly defined as the status quo, because Emacs
> "mostly works".  Any significant change in such a low-level facility
> is, therefore, "insane", IMNSHO, unless the problem is also general.

The problem is indeed general, in the sense that self-insert-function is
general.  The effects of the problem have only been felt in the
electric-... minor modes so far.

> And we don't have evidence that the problem is global.

We have a complete understanding of how self-insert-function is broken.
This has had damaging effects in the interface between
electric-pair-mode and CC Mode for which workarounds were installed in
CC Mode.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).