Re: reverting non-existent file

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Colin Baxter <address@hidden>
> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden>,  Emacs Development <address@hidden>
> Date: Fri, 15 May 2020 06:36:15 +0100
> 
> Why must a user who has run 'add-file-local-variable-prop-line' be prompted
> with anything? What about just removing 'revert-buffer'?

As things frequently are in Emacs lately, any such minor bug report is
usually the result of an attempt to fix another minor bug report.  In
this case, see bug#9820.

I think we should try to restrain ourselves in our vigor of fixing
every minor annoyance users report, because this kind of story happens
time and again.  Emacs is a very old and complex package, and trying
to fix these minor annoyances more often than not exhibits the
behavior known to control engineers as the "limit cycle": small
oscillations that don't converge.  IOW, fixing one small bug
introduces another small bug of the same (and sometimes higher)
annoyance level.

At some point, we should simply decide not to fix such small
annoyances, because they almost always have simple workarounds.