RE: [PATCH] Re: About the :distant-foreground face attribute

[Drew Adams]

One more try.

> >>> What you are saying is like saying that you think you have a
> >>> license to change the value of option `default-frame-alist'
> >>> automatically, if the current value is nil, because that's
> >>> also the default value.
> >>
> >> Well, yes, we do have such a license. By this logic, we can't
> >> change any default ever.
> >
> > Did you notice "automatically" and "current value" in that
> > sentence?  I'm not talking about the license of Emacs Dev to
> > redefine the _default_ value.

Please read that sentence again, because you keep going on about
how Emacs can change the default value.  That's not the point.

> > I'm talking about license to change the _current_ value of an
> > option, on the fly, automatically, behind the user's back...
> > - just because the current value happens to coincide with
> > the default value (`nil' in this case).
> >
> > A user's not customizing an option away from the default value
> > is not implicit permission for Emacs to twiddle the current
> > value to something different.
> 
> I honestly don't understand what you're talking about...
> If a user hasn't customized an option and has relied on the
> default, we can modify the default values when we update Emacs.

Yes, yes.  Emacs Dev can change the default value.  No one says
otherwise.  What the code being added now does is more than that.
It changes the appearance of the face on the fly - the current
state, not the default value.

And the rationale you gave for dynamically changing the face
appearance was that the user had not customized the face away
from the default spec, so she must not care.  That does not
follow.

My point was that a license to change the value dynamically
does not come from the user not changing the default value.

The default value for option `foo' is 42.  The user does not
change that.  That fact alone does not let you presume that
the user does not mind if you change the value of `foo' on
the fly in some contexts to 3000.

Yes, the analogy is not exact. You are not changing the
`foreground' attribute itself.  You are changing the face's
foreground appearance.  The `foreground' attribute says nil
or "LightBlue" or whatever the default defface specifies,
but on the fly the apparent foreground sometimes ends up
being "HelloKittyPink" (even though the attribute value has
not changed).

You can do that, but your being able to do that does not
follow from the user not having customized the option.