bug#12467: 24.1; customization initialization confusing

[Glenn Morris]

Robert Horn wrote:

> I found a confusing behaviour for customization.  To trigger the
> behavior, assign a value of "t" to org-habit-show-all-today.  What I
> found is:
>
>  - If you start emacs and immediately go into *shell* and print 
> org-habit-show-today-all you get an error because that variable has not yet 
> been bound.

Customization only applies settings when relevant. Otherwise it would
have to unconditionally load at startup every package in which you have
customized an option. Use plain-old setq if you need different behaviour.

>   - If you start emacs and immediately go into options->config for
>   org-habit, the org-habit-show-today-all will indicate that it has
>   been set outside of the customization system when the customized
>   value is "t". When the customized value is "nil" there is no
>   indicated problem.

Sounds like a bug. However, there is no "org-habit-show-today-all"
variable in the Emacs trunk so I cannot test this. I cannot reproduce
this when customizing eg
org-export-html-table-use-header-tags-for-first-column.

> But a naive user would expect that starting the customization process
> for the group would also cause processing of the startup
> customization.

I don't really know what this means.