Re: Documentation for custom-file - is not (load custom-file) needed?

[Luc Teirlinck]

Richard Stallman wrote:

   In general, issues of what would happen when advanced users do obscure
   and unusual things do not carry a lot of weight.  Even if something
   mildly unfortunate happens in these scenarios, it is not a strong argument
   against a change.  The users who do this will just have to cope.

I believe that nearly every user of Emacs has some specialized
(i.e. obscure and unusual) needs of one form or the other.  The more
unexpected things happen in such situations, the less reliable Emacs
becomes and reliability is, to me, one of the most important aspects
of the quality of a program.

I really do not want to go on forever about this, but I still want to
point out one last time how easy the alternative is:

(1)  Disable automatic loading of custom-file after .emacs.

(2)  Make the defcustom into a defvar.  Even better (but this is a
     minor issue): leave the defcustom, but put in a not to be missed
     warning in the Custom buffer.  The latter provides full 100%
     backward compatibility and helps people who use Custom as a
     browser (which means most people).

(3) Tell people who want to customize `custom-file' to put:
   
    (setq custom-file "~/mycustom.el")
    (load custom-file)

    in their .emacs (or something more complex for version specific
    customization).

End of problem.  In case of the latter version of (2), there is 100%
backward compatibility and zero chance of confusing or inconveniencing
people.  With the former version of (2), it is pretty close: only
people who used Custom before (like me) have to watch out and do
something.

I do not know what problem you are trying to solve that is worth the
trouble that your more complex solution would create: (1) solves the
repeated loading problem, (2) solves the Custom problem and I am
unaware of any other problems that have been reported.

Is the problem that the user has to write two lines into .emacs
instead of one?  Given that this only has to be done either once or
for every new Emacs version, this seems completely insignificant.

Is the remaining problem is that a beginning user might load a file
with a `custom-set-variables' form that is not his custom-file,
without fully know what he is doing?  If so, we could treat that more
or less like a disabled command.  Warn and provide a variable to
eliminate the warning.

Sincerely,

Luc.