Re: Upcoming 23.1 release

[Stefan Monnier]

> can lead to data loss anyway.  Secondly, because of Rmail-mbox's funky
> buffer-swapping design, it's not even clear to me that turning on
> auto-save-mode manually in Rmail leads to the correct buffer being
> auto-saved.

AFAIK tar-mode (which also uses the buffer-swapping) support
auto-saving.  So either Rmail can be fixed to work like tar-mode, or
tar-mode suffers from the same problem (unnoticed until now).

> I think the correct fix is to change `buffer-swap-text', giving it an
> optional argument that makes it swap the two buffers' values of
> auto-save-file-name and auto_save_modified (and possibly other
> file-related variables also).

At least in tar-mode, auto-save-file-name doesn't need to be moved to
the data buffer.  But, maybe auto_save_modified and a few other vars
need to be treated more carefully.

> And we need an additional hook into auto-save-mode that Rmail can use
> to ensure that M-x auto-save-mode turns on auto-save in the
> correct buffer.

That sounds to me like it's going in the wrong direction.


        Stefan