Re: Buffer-local faces

[Miles Bader]

On Tue, May 04, 2004 at 11:18:21AM +0200, David Kastrup wrote:
> I am uncomfortable about the whole change.  And the reason has to do
> with the feature freeze.  Now you may argue that the change is not so
> intrusive as to be likely to trigger new bugs, but that's beside the
> point.

I said nothing about the feature freeze.  I did not post my patch to `sneak
in under the wire' of the freeze, I posted it because I (1) happened to have
been working on it, and (2) came up with something nice.

> So I think we should first try to resolve what the perceived problem
> is, what extensions or generalizations of this problem should also be
> solvable, and what would be the most logical, consistent and useful
> way to tackle it.

The patch is in reaction to various past mailing list dicussions; usually
the specific functionality requested is `how can I have a buffer-specific
default/mode-line face' (it always seems to be those two faces).

Anyway, that's what _I_ want to do with it.

> It just appears that a buffer-local replacement list is a kludge for
> avoiding a more general scheme of context-dependent faces (probably
> related to the XEmacs locale/specifier stuff), and maybe other things.

I don't think it's a kludge at all, it's an elegant way of leveraging emacs'
very flexible variable mechanism to achieve the goal -- not only is it almost
trivial to implement, but it would seem to fit very well with the way emacs
modes work.

Perhaps xemacs has a better way of doing it, I don't know -- I'm afraid I'm
not familiar with xemacs in recent years.

-Miles
-- 
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