On Mon, 19 Feb 2001, Ronan Waide said:
> On February 19, [EMAIL PROTECTED] said:
>> GNU Emacs "official philosophy" is that "loading a file should not
>> change Emacs' behaviour". Maybe we could comply with it by removing
>>
>> (add-hook 'bbdb-list-hook 'bbdb-fontify-buffer)
>>
>> from the file and recommending it in the docs?
>
> Official philosophy can take a hike on this. I'll happily document it,
It's XEmacs's philosophy too, and the philosophy has a reason. If you
have any `defcustom's in a given .el, then a menu option for that
defcustom gets put (by the grace of `update-custom.sh' and
`custom-load.el') into the (big) Options|Customize menu.
Going into that menu now loads the .el file to run the `defcustom'.
(Yes, this sucks; got a better method, that responds fast when the
defcustom is changed?)
Would you want the behaviour of your XEmacs to change just because you
looked at a menu --- didn't do anything there, mind you, just looked at
it?
Hence the policy.
> but the whole point of loading the file seperately is to get the font
> and menu features. It doesn't make sense to me to say "load this file
As long as it has no defcustoms (which means you can't use customize for
it, or you have to define all its customizable variables in some other
file).
>> may I ask why?
>
> It's not released. I've already stated this as a reason. If you go to
... and this is correct, too; it's official GNU policy that releases
must not depend upon unreleased software, which either leads to
coordination hell, or means the development versions must conform to it
too, or is quietly bent (viz GCC-3.0's Standard C++ library's configure
scripts are generated with unreleased versions of autoconf, but it's
not likely to hold up the release!)
> Again, it's philosophy vs. actual coding errors. And it's philosophy
There are many philosophical bugs in XEmacs, for starters, some of which
are *hugely* hard to fix. (e.g. my current zone of attack (with not much
chance I'll ever finish it) is to rewrite the redisplay engine such that
you can run Lisp from within it, because that'd let us have customizable
redisplay, rewrite much of it in Lisp, and rewrite specifiers to be
essentially unlimitedly flexible... I like the idea. Very hard though.)
> religious arguments over GNUmacs, and the bottom line is that I seem
> to be orthogonal to the Official Philosophy on certain issues.
Likewise. I find XEmacs slightly closer to my philosophy, but still
different; so I intend to perturb it until it is closer ;)
--
`I put "Update To-Do List" on my to-do list. I'm never sure whether or
not to tick it off.' --- Simon Cozens
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