RE: custom-set-variables considered harmful

[Drew Adams]

> > Thus, if you use ‘setq’ instead of ‘custom-set-variable’ you need to
> > manually check every single variable to ensure they don't have setter
> > functions assigned.  If you want to be thorough (nobody is) you also
> > need to check them every time your modules are updated.  This is not
> > just a theoretical situation.
> 
> Note that there are also many situations where the var has a setter, yet
> doing (setq foo val) on it from your ~/.emacs will still work correctly
> (as long as you do it before loading the library).
> I'd argue it's actually the most frequent case.
> 
> > It happened in gnu-apl-mode, a library for which I am the maintainer.
> > In it, the variable ‘gnu-apl-mode-map-prefix’ got a setter function
> > after the fact.
> 
> Looking at gnu-apl-mode.el, I get the impression that this is no
> exception:
> 
>     (setq gnu-apl-mode-map-prefix "C-")
>     (require 'gnu-apl-mode)
> 
> will result in the exact same state as
> 
>     (customize-set-variable 'gnu-apl-mode-map-prefix "C-")
>     (require 'gnu-apl-mode)
> 
> after gnu-apl-mode is loaded, OTOH you indeed need to use
> customize-set-variable because a setq would have no real effect.

It may be the case that many uses of `setq' amount to the
same thing as using `c-s-var*'.  But I'm not sure what
that changes.

Here's a crazy possibility (not a suggestion, but maybe
food for thought): Make `setq' do `customize-set-variable'
for an option and do what it does now otherwise.

(Ducks for cover...)