custom-file should be allowed to be an alist

[David Kastrup]

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Please describe exactly what actions triggered the bug
and the precise symptoms of the bug:

Some people like sorting their various customization variables into
different files so as to keep them under version control, and to see
what they have there, or so that they can exchange some files for
functionality they want to have configured sometimes so, sometimes
so.  How to support this?  Well, if custom-file was an alist, one
could just look up the group of the variable to be customized in it,
and associate a filename with it.  If the group is not in there, take
the parent group and repeat.  Top groups of course have a parent of
nil.  That way, a cons cell with nil in its car would serve as a
fallback for variables which have no group in their ancestry
specified.

In GNU Emacs 21.3.50.16 (i686-pc-linux-gnu, X toolkit, Xaw3d scroll bars)
 of 2003-01-06 on lola.goethe.zz
configured using `configure '--prefix=/usr/local/emacs-21' 
'INSTALL_INFO=/sbin/install-info''

Important settings:
  value of $LC_ALL: nil
  value of $LC_COLLATE: nil
  value of $LC_CTYPE: nil
  value of $LC_MESSAGES: nil
  value of $LC_MONETARY: nil
  value of $LC_NUMERIC: nil
  value of $LC_TIME: nil
  value of $LANG: en_US
  locale-coding-system: iso-latin-1
  default-enable-multibyte-characters: t

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum