RE: display-buffer-alist simplifications

[Drew Adams]

> IMHO, you've taken a lot of time to think of this, and the added
> complexity, if any, is added flexibility.  I think we should strive to
> make the current funcionality of your changes clearer and better
> documented. If we stat removing things now, we'll be doomed to re-add
> them some day, not long, when people starts to ask for ways to make it
> work like it was before (you've seen enough of my private bug reports
> to know how true that is ;-)

I tend to agree with what Juanma says here, though I'm not really able to judge
what is needed, myself.  I expect that Martin has looked at the various
requirements more than anyone else, and I imagine he has done a good job of
coming up with a coherent solution that covers them.  We definitely do not want
to start over from scratch and risk destabilizing things a great deal.

That said, there is a lot to understand, and I'm guessing that we, including
Martin, might not see clearly what TRT is until, in fact, we start trying to
explain/describe it better.

That sounds backward, I know, but for lack of a functional spec I'm guessing
that it is especially when we try to document things more clearly that we might
come up with a few ideas that could improve the design.  It can sometimes happen
that by trying to explain something you understand it better and see some
possible simplifications.

In a way, that's perhaps what Stefan is doing here: trying to fit it all
together in his mind and ask questions about how things might be made simpler.
Nothing wrong with that.  Probably Martin will be the best judge in the end,
having a better grasp of all the ramifications, but it might help Martin for
people to express other views, as Stefan has done.

I worry a bit about too much redesign destabilizing things now.  Like Juanma, I
think of all the bugs and corner cases that Martin has dealt with already,
incrementally.

I posted some questions a while back wrt documenting this stuff.  Just trying to
answer questions like those might help us see a bit more clearly.  Maybe; dunno.
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2011-06/msg00677.html

I know that Martin has planned to revisit the doc, in any case.  I'm guessing
that when we start to focus on the doc/explanation we will try better to look at
things as a user (different users, with different use cases), and that might
help the design.

I'm imagining a bit of iteration on this: explanation, maybe tweak the design a
bit, explanation, tweak,...  I don't expect perfect user doc or a perfect design
the first time around the block.  Actually, we've already been around the block
a bit.  And obviously, repeating what I said above, we want to avoid thrashing
and introducing new bugs.

Dunno, but I think it might be a mistake at this time for Martin to ask Stefan &
Yidong, "I can make such-and-such a change, if that's what you want - let me
know."  I suspect that it is not yet the time to decide some of these things.

Just one opinion.