Re: Eliminating "changed in Emacs outside of Customize"

[Per Abrahamsen <abraham@dina.kvl.dk>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

>     > Could you tell us the reason why you designed Custom to recognize a
>     > state of "changed in Emacs outside of Customize"? 
>
>     If you .emacs, or some third party code you activate from ".emacs",
>     contains "(setq foo 42)" and you change and save "foo" from customize,
>     you changes to the variable through customize will be overwritten next
>     time you start Emacs.
>
> Are you saying your concern was specifically for the case
> where foo is set outside Custom *from the init file*?

Yes, directly and indirectly.

> What about the case where the user just evals M-: (setq foo 42) RET
> while running Emacs?  

I suspect that is much rarer.

> If instead it were
> described as "Set but not saved", exactly as if the user had used
> Customize to set it to 42, do you see any problem that would happen?

Any command that set the variable interactively is ok.  I believe part
of the manu bar code use "setq" or "custrom-set-variable" depending on
whether it is called interactively or not.

>     In order for customize to work non-surprisingly, it has to be the only
>     interface for changing the variable.
>
> Why do you think so?  In particular, if changes outside Custom
> were treated as if they had happened within Custom, what problem
> do you envision?

Was this unclear: 

  If you .emacs, or some third party code you
  activate from ".emacs", contains "(setq foo 42)" and you change and
  save "foo" from customize, you changes to the variable through
  customize will be overwritten next time you start Emacs.

?