Re: Poll: is ~/.emacs auto-migration worthwhile? Or too dangerous? (was: Re: [PATCH] fix corruption of ~/.emacs when trying to migrate an init file XEmacs can't fully load)

SL Baur writes: Nonsense. Custom is badly broken in this respect; it simply overwrites anything it can find, globally. Most of the time it doesn't cause any problems, but when there *are* problems the failure mode is catastrophic. The point of the automatic migration is to get people to use a separate ~/.xemacs/custom.el, and apparently it's been fairly successful. As a symptom, "Why doesn't my handwritten (custom-set-something ...) form DTRT?" used to be a FAQ, now it's very rare; I've seen it recently, but the time before that was literally years ago. Automatic migration was a good idea and still is. It is obvious that backing up files that we're going to overwrite is long overdue ... but Custom still doesn't do that, a tradition of screwing the user that goes back at least 10 years! (Which makes an implementation of auto-migration that depends on `custom-save' to be safe a criminal act, IMO. But I've never had time to fix it.) _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://calypso.tux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta