Re: Release plans [was: Building packages with 21.5b29?]

David Kastrup writes: This is only if you tell custom to save customizations. Last I heard, Emacs writes *all* customizations to .emacs, not to a special custom- only file (but I haven't paid much attention to Emacs's customize facilities since the bug described below was fixed). So that's what I would *expect* to happen if I (a) tell XEmacs not to migrate and (b) proceed to customize and save customizations. What do you expect it to do? What do you want it to do, if that's different from what you might expect? No, XEmacs has the habit of doing what it is told to do by the user. A user doing a "test drive" without migrating code from .emacs to .xemacs/init.el should not be saving customizations AFAICS. Why would she? There was indeed a bug where if there was GNU-Emacs-specific code that caused an error during the migration process, then the reading of the customizations was aborted, but XEmacs would write the incomplete customizations out to the specified file later upon request to save. This could happen without the migration process as well, but the migration process made it very likely that the user would save the broken file, overwriting the good customizations. However, that was fixed within a few days of release, just about 10 years ago. And in fact that whole release was withdrawn and deprecated (over the objections of other reviewers, sad to say, but it was withdrawn and deprecated). And in any case it required a specific request from the user to save customizations. This is a serious design bug in Customize as implemented by Per (ie, that the file is completely rewritten to save any one change). I don't know if Emacs does it differently these days, but in 2001 it was possible to get the same behavior from Emacs. Of course it was much less likely, because if customizations were broken enough to interrupt the initialization process, the user would be aware, and probably would fix the initialization process by hand without doing custom-save-all. By contrast the migration process would blithely ask the user if he wanted to save despite the failed initialization. As the reporter admitted, "if I had been thinking I would have known better than to save anything since I hadn't done anything I wanted to save", but it's equally true that if Emacs initialization blows up in your face, you're probably not thinking very clearly. _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://lists.xemacs.org/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta