"Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull(a)sk.tsukuba.ac.jp&gt; writes: Yes, but most of the offending code originates from FSF in the first place. While their typical usage happens to result in correct behaviour in XEmacs 20, I agree that following/preceding-char are bad style in both Emacsen. I propose simply defaulting `debug_issue_ebola_notices' to 0. Then you can put `(setq debug-issue-ebola-notices t)' to your .emacs and be a happy man. Leaving the code in by default is OK with me -- debug builds are not destined to be lightning-fast anyway, and most debugging features are changeable at run-time. I think the maintenance cost should be minimal if we remove the "abracadabra" hacks which were introduced in order to make the use of XEmacs with these warnings more palatable. We might also want to remove some uses of EQ_WITH_EBOLA_NOTICE, such as in the _no_quit functions.