Re: [sumner@graphics.lcs.mit.edu] Faces wrong when opening new frame (PR#1465)

Yoshiki> "Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull(a)sk.tsukuba.ac.jp&gt; writes: Yoshiki> Your comment here is clearly wrong. Huh? This is an example of the kind of thing that Custom does; Custom is far too complicated to precisely trace whether any particular function is doing evil or not. That's what I said. Yoshiki> It is called only before .emacs (or .xemacs/init.el) is Yoshiki> loaded and never called again. Doesn't satisfy the condition I just wrote? The points are that (1) Custom is _full_ of calls to reset-face type functions that destroy user customizations unless they were made through Custom. (2) Custom is _full_ of functions that masquerade as non-custom functions, making it impossible to see which code is really basic and which code is a Custom layer. lisp/faces.el in particular is a completely mixed bag of functions, most of which now expect Custom-style specifications, not XEmacs specifier-style specifications. However, this is not reflected in their names or docstrings (except indirectly via reference to "defface", which itself is a Custom interface). Yoshiki> The issue here is not the order of Custom and user Yoshiki> setting. Of course it is one of the issues. There may be others, too. But if you make sure you do your own setting after Custom does, your settings will rule. If you don't, Custom reserves the right to trash them. Always has before, and it is impossible to tell from the code in faces.el just what Custom does respect nowadays. You make exactly the same point yourself: try using Custom exclusively. Yoshiki> The problem is XEmacs tries to adjust face accroding to Yoshiki> background color of default face. This may also be a problem. I think adjusting faces with respect to the default face's background is a very bad idea as a basic function; it should be done at a very high level, such as Custom themes. At lower levels, functions should do what the user says. Yoshiki> Current model is not working too well. No, and it has been sucky for years. However, Custom does little to help; Custom has always tried to force the world into a simplified model. For example, Custom still knows nothing about non-ISO8859-* fonts. The last big Custom blowup occurred because it reset the faces anyway, despite there being data there it didn't understand. Apparently it is still doing it. I've tried to do something about it and been defeated. I just don't understand what Custom is trying to do. I doubt that's because the code sucks; anybody who has worked much with fonts and/or Mule charsets knows that this stuff is just plain hard. It's not surprising the code is hairy and hard to follow: the underlying process is, too. What I object to is the fact that Custom uses functions like `reset-face', whose documentation says "only do this if you know you want to". What has consistently been the case is that Custom has called this function behind the backs of users who definitely didn't want it to happen, but Custom didn't know any better. It really should stop doing this. -- University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091 _________________ _________________ _________________ _________________ What are those straight lines for? "XEmacs rules."