Re: [emacs-wiki-discuss] Re: setq instead of custom-set-variables

[fouvry+emacs-wiki]

| That sounds good, and much better than having .emacs get squished.  
| 
| But I still share Sacha's liking for modularisation.  I like to be able
| to hand a fellow worker a more or less self contained blob of lisp if
| they ask me "how do I do that thing you do?"  The problem with the
| customize-group thing is that it seems to want to shove all
| customization into one place - .emacs or, in your case, another file.

More recent customize versions actually sort the symbols, so that
everything (if the package was written according to the
guidelines) can be found in the same "blob" of customisation
code.

There are however cases where it is nice not to use customize,
namely when you want to compute a value for a setup variable.  A
typical example: on-the-fly construction of regexps from a list
of strings using regexp-opt: it easier to maintain strings than a
large regexp.  You could probably set it in customize too, but
then it's fixed (I bet customize just overwrites the sexp you
would put in to do the on-the-fly computation when you save via
the interface).

Frederik