Re: custom-set-variables considered harmful

[Elias Mårtenson]

On 29 November 2017 at 23:00, Stefan Monnier <address@hidden> wrote:

> 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 is. But why does that make a difference? There are plenty of other things that

works almost all the time, even though it's not recommended.

All I'm trying to say is that we currently have two methods for setting custom

variables:

  - setq - works almost all the time

  - custom-set-variable - works all the time

I'm not saying that anyone should make setq not work. I'm simply suggesting that

perhaps it's a good idea to recommend users that they use the one, simple,

mechanism that exists and works all the time.

Wouldn't that make things simpler in the long run?

Regards,

Elias