Re: Incorporating caching into defgroup/defcustom/defvar for Emacs 25

[Artur Malabarba]

2015-02-02 13:03 GMT+00:00 Stephen J. Turnbull <address@hidden>:
> Artur Malabarba writes:
>  > On 2 Feb 2015 01:07, "Stephen J. Turnbull" <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>  > > Why not?  Custom provides a "reset" functionality if the user *wants*
>  > > to reset.  It's not clear to me that a user wouldn't want changes to
>  > > customizable variables to persist.
>  >
>  > I wasn't saying defcustoms shouldn't be persistent, I was just
>  > saying they already have a great mechanism for that so they don't
>  > need to use this caching mechanism that is being suggested for
>  > internal variables.
>
> Yes, they might.  A user who is testing out a new custom setting might
> like the setting to persist without explicitly saving it if Emacs
> crashes or he runs out of memory and needs to stop and restart Emacs,
> or something like that.
>
>  > > What does stash provide that a session manager such as desktop.el
>  > > doesn't?  That wasn't clear to me from your long email.
>  >
>  > With stash, a package can specify that a global variable is supposed to be
>  > persistent, and this variable will automatically be saved/loaded from disk.
>  >
>  > I understand desktop.el provides similar functionality, but, IIUC,
>  > desktop.el is more of a user interface. By that I mean sessions are
>  > only saved/loaded if desktop-mode is enabled,
>
> The people I know who use desktop generally enable it in init.el.  The
> only way to disable it AFAIK is -q.
>
>  > Stash provides a simple abstraction for a variable that will be
>  > persistent accross sessions. You just declare a variable to be
>  > persistent (Sean suggested a `defvar*' macro,
>
> Ah, OK, so the important thing is that the programmer controls it, not
> the user.

Precisely.