Re: emacs/lisp ChangeLog

[Stefan Monnier]

>> It seems many files still have leading * in their defcustoms. For
>> example, have a peek at the nxml directory.

No big deal.  They're pretty harmless anyway.

>> BTW, I am curious about the leading *, what does it do? Why so many old
>> packages are using it?
> It was used to mark a variable as a user option.

More specifically it was used to tell M-x set-variable that it could
operate on it.

> This is obsolete; nowadays people should just use defcustom.

Nowadays, set-variable automatically considers all defcustom'd variables
as being acceptable, so the * is redundant for them.


        Stefan