bug#4041: 23.0.92; Emacs 23: buffer point is no longer frame-local

[Steve Yegge]

I don't know if anyone's expecting me to weigh in, as I've already used way too many words to explain how I think it should work, and none of the intervening discussion has given me a reason to reconsider that position.

But I'll add that defending the current behavior of switch-to-buffer is a bit odd, since it doesn't do anything meaningful or useful as-is.

In particular, if you are switching to a buffer that is already showing in another window, it currently takes you to to a location in that buffer that can best be described as "arbitrary".  I was generously assuming that it was some deterministic function of how the buffer is already being displayed in other windows, but Martin claims that no, it just shows you "somewhere" in the buffer, wherever that window-point happens to be.  It's certainly not semantically meaningful to the contents of the buffer.

My proposal -- which people sound like they agree with, and Leo has even implemented as an add-on -- takes the default behavior from arbitrary to not only predictable but in fact useful.  The only way anyone would even notice that you've changed something is if they were somehow relying on the arbitrary default behavior, but as we've determined that it's not especially predictable, I don't see how anyone could have been relying on it.  If we're really worried about it, we can make a compatibility variable.

-steve