Aidan Kehoe <kehoea(a)parhasard.net> writes:
Ar an dara lá is fiche de mí Márta, scríobh Michael Sperber:
> Aidan> That was a hypothetical, describing what could reasonably happen
> Aidan> if we gave responsibility for XEmacs~ defaults to the
> Aidan> packages. XEmacs~ defaults should be XEmacs~ responsibility.
>
> Sorry for the confusion---but, to take this one step further, I would
> swear energetically at VM if the the pure act of installing it would
> change anything about the behavior of my XEmacs.
In this proposed patch~s case, to behaviour that the XEmacs developers
prefer and have documented, and that has the real-life immediate benefit
that people can attach things--files that trigger crashes, for example--to
their bug reports out of the box? Why? This isn~t MH-E, where you need an
external program to have any sort of mail reading functionality, this isn~t
Gnus where the mail sending buffer has different bindings, the effective
change is that the default mailer now has MIME support, which is
unreservedly a good thing.
I think we should think long and hard when changing XEmacs defaults based on
what packages are installed, but I think also that there are cases where it
should be done.
Hi Aidan,
are you aware of
(info "(xemacs)Behaviors")
The thought there is that just loading or requiring a feature should
not change the "behavior" of XEmacs, only the enabling of this loaded
feature.
This should make various aspects of XEmacs behave more predictably.
Currently just loading clearcase, or tramp, or build (to name a few)
might make far-reaching changes to XEmacs' behavior.
Finding the "best" MUA at startup time seems also to go against the
behavior use model.
Adrian
> Not the least because if creates dependencies where we already have way
> too many.
What dependencies does it create? If VM is installed, either its
dependencies are too, or we already have a problem. There are admittedly
more code paths to test in this case; that~s part of why we should think
long and hard before changing any XEmacs defaults based on the packages that
are present.
--
Adrian Aichner
mailto:adrian@xemacs.org
http://www.xemacs.org/