RE: delete-windows-on

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Drew Adams writes:
 > Let me summarize the current state of the discussion and my
 > questions/suggestions:

1 & 2 omitted.

 > 3. Emacs 23 always returns nil. Dunno what the case was before
 >    23. I don't have a problem with it always returning nil.
 > 
 > I did suggest that we might instead return something indicating
 > whether a window was actually deleted, similarly to how
 > `kill-buffer' lets you know whether it killed the buffer. But this
 > suggestion is not so important.

My personal preference here is no; code that doesn't accept the
possibility of a dead window error should check window-live-p.  But
the analogy with kill-buffer is appropriate.  So I guess that's a -0.

4 omitted.

 > 5. Raising an error for a string that does not name an existing
 >    buffer is wrong, IMO. No other opinions expressed about this, so far.

AFAICS such a string is a programming error, because (as you've
pointed out yourself) interactively the user must specify an existing
buffer.  Such errors should be raised as early as possible.

If you have a use case, please specify it.  For now, I'm strongly in
favor of raising an error.

 > 6. I suggested that for interactive use the completion candidates
 >    be limited to buffers that actually have windows. No other
 >    opinions expressed about this, so far.

+0.5.  I'm not sure it's worth the programming effort, but I see no
harm in it.