Re: Things I would like to be added after the release

[Richard Stallman]

    0)   ECB works fine as is with advice.

ECB is currently an add-on, distributed separately from Emacs.
If we install it, it will be a part of Emacs.

It is bad design to use advice _within_ Emacs.  Advice is a kind of
"come from" construct, and such constructs are very bad for clarity of
a large program.

A few years ago, some programs were installed that contain advice, and
that is a problem.  We need to fix these problems, not add more of
them.  Thus, to install ECB, we need to rewrite the parts that use
advice, make them use other mechanisms.

For instance, we can put the code (or explicit calls to it) into the
functions which currently are advised by ECB.  That is not perfectly
elegant, but it is better than using advice.

This means instead of

(defadvice foo ...)

we have

(defun ecb-foo-extension ...)

and we put an explicit conditional call to ecb-foo-extension
into the definition of foo.