Re: Changes to hi-lock before release.

[David Koppelman]

Alan Mackenzie <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi, Richard, Chong and Emacs!
>
> Sorry to come into this thread so late.  I think there're serious
> problems with the patched hi-lock-mode (I've just fired up the latest
> pretest, 22.0.99): it treats users with less friendliness than they're
> entitled to expect:

It's all my fault. Had I attended to this sooner there would have been
time to come up with something better for existing users. The reason
for setting it to 'never rather than 'ask is because I felt it was
worse to harass unsophisticated users with questions each time they
visited a file than to temporarily deny users the patterns they
already have in files.

In a future change I'm going to apply some kind of conservative safety
test to the patterns and either reject or ask about those which fail
the tests. I'm also thinking about specifying patterns in a .emacs
file that would be applied to files with names matching a regexp (or
passing some other test).

> Why do I have to write

> (defun return-t (arg) t)
>
> , and set the hi-lock-file-patterns-policy to that instead?  Is this
> some sort of security by obscurity?

The security is against mischief in files visited by Emacs. Users edit
their .emacs file at their own risk.

The hi-lock-file-patterns-policy variable was made into a defcustom.