Re: Customize Rogue

[David Masterson]

>>>>> Per Abrahamsen writes:

> David Masterson <address@hidden> writes:

>> One potential you might be missing is that other Emacs "packages"
>> could "dump" a "customization" for a user.  That is, during the
>> installation of a package, the package may create a (set of) custom
>> calls that fit the package to the environment of the user.  Later,
>> if the user chooses to (re-)customize his Emacs, would he be
>> "confused" by the message?  (too many quotes :-\ )

> If the package uses 'customize-save-variable' to "dump" the values,
> everything will work fine.  The variables will be marked "Set and
> saved" inside customize, and if the user changes them from customize
> it will just work.

> If the package on the other hand dumps the new values by writing
> setq's in .emacs, it will not be possible for the user to change
> them later from customize.  In that case the warning is needed, and
> he will get it.

John Wiegley has a tool called initsplit.el on his web-site for
breaking customizations into multiple files.  The issue (I believe) is
why load all the customization information for a package into Emacs if
you're not going to load the package (at least during this particular
session)?  Also, it would allow you to keep the customizations for a
package close to (in the sense of your .emacs files) everything else
associated with the package.  Different people (I guess) have
different levels of what they consider to be a "tidy" .emacs file.

However, you've got a good point that I can't think how customize
would be able to find and set the customizations once they've been
"split" into multiple locations -- regardless whether the split was
done in customize fashion (a la initsplit.el) or via setq like things
(a la set-activate).  You could set things up such that the default
customization location is updated by customize, but you'd have to hand
modify the other locations which is not in keeping with simplicity.

Hmmm.  :-\

-- 
David Masterson                David DOT Masterson AT synopsys DOT com
Sr. R&D Engineer               Synopsys, Inc.
Software Engineering           Sunnyvale, CA