How about moving the stuff currently in files.el to packages?
It doesn't make sense to me to have the associations in core, where we
can not assume that the modes referred to are present.
The affected lists in files.el would be auto-mode-alist and
interpreter-mode-alist, and the snippets in modes in packages would use
add-to-list with autoload cookies so that the change wouldn't break
backwards compatibility and could be applied to both 21.5 and 21.4. The
actual defvar's would still be in files.el.
This might not be perfect, there is a blurb in 21.[45]'s files.el
containing a better suggestion, but it would make things consistent, as
there are already lots of related add-to-lists in packages ATM. I think
I could come up with a patch pretty quickly.
--
\/ille Skyttä
ville.skytta at
xemacs.org