Re: Finding packages to enable by default

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Tom writes:
 > Stefan Monnier <monnier <at> iro.umontreal.ca> writes:
 > 
 > > 
 > > > Stepping on each other's toes simply means the later exiting emacs
 > > > overwrites the other's history file.
 > > 
 > > Thus losing history info, yes.  But it's not that simple.  You may get
 > > prompted (apparently "out of nowhere") if the two processes happen to
 > > write "at the same time".
 > 
 > Can this warning be suppressed and have the history overwritten without
 > a warning? If so then it's a simple fix (shells do the same thing) and
 > makes it possible to enable this feature by default. 

Emacs is not a shell.  I don't mind losing shell history because it's
very repetitive, and long snippets I typically save to my .zshrc or
.profile with a history|tail|head|cut pipeline (which itself I really
ought to make a shell function for) because I know they'll get tromped
if/when I shutdown.

 > For most users this will do,

The word "most" should immediately clue you that this is inappropriate
as a default.  In particular, I don't use recentf because I have the
files in buffers.  The desktop file saves them for me on restart.
That would be a massive annoyance if that got overwritten because I
forgot to use -q on an experimental emacs instance.