Gratuitous user interface change risks losing user work

[Gregory Stark]

I just got bit by this and I bet others will too. In previous versions of
Emacs C-x C-v (find-alternate-file) used to prompt you if you hadn't saved the
work in the current buffer and you used to have to press 'y' to discard it.
*Now* it prompts you asking if you want to *save* your work. So if you use it
to revert the buffer to the last saved version -- something I do quite
frequently and have become accustomed to hitting 'y' quite quickly -- the
default action is to *overwrite* your work!

This is awful. I just lost several days of work myself and I bet others will
come across this too. Randomly going around reversing the sense of questions
the user is asked is seriously disturbing.

This is exacerbated by the documented regression in find-file to no longer
allow the shortcut of simply hitting return to reread the current file. So now
find-file doesn't work as expected and the obvious substitute C-x C-v actively
destroys the user's work.





In GNU Emacs 22.0.50.1 (i686-pc-linux-gnu, X toolkit, Xaw3d scroll bars)
 of 2006-08-24 on stark
X server distributor `The X.Org Foundation', version 11.0.70000000
configured using `configure '--enable-asserts' 'CFLAGS=-g -O0''

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_GB
  locale-coding-system: iso-8859-1
  default-enable-multibyte-characters: t

Major mode: SQL[ansi]

Minor modes in effect:
  tooltip-mode: t
  mouse-wheel-mode: t
  file-name-shadow-mode: t
  global-font-lock-mode: t
  font-lock-mode: t
  blink-cursor-mode: t
  unify-8859-on-encoding-mode: t
  utf-translate-cjk-mode: t
  auto-compression-mode: t
  line-number-mode: t

Recent input:
C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n 
C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n 
C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n C-l C-n 
C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n 
C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n C-n C-l C-n 
C-n C-p C-p C-x b * G S-SPC C-g <escape> x r e p o 
r t - e m c a s - <M-backspace> e m a c s - b u g 
<return>

Recent messages:
Auto-saving...done
Undo!
Redo!
Undo!
Redo! [2 times]
Buffer number.sql is modified; save it first? (y or n) 
Kill and replace the buffer without saving it? (y or n) 
number.sql has auto save data; consider M-x recover-this-file
Quit
Loading emacsbug...done

-- 
  Gregory Stark
  EnterpriseDB          http://www.enterprisedb.com