Re: Confused by y-or-n-p

[Stefan Monnier]

> I agree with you that this is already happening in the vast majority of
> cases, so why would it be problematic to make this a rule, that in principle
> any change to Emacs' behavior should provide a way to re-enable the old
> behavior?  IIUC that's all Richard wants.  Of course that rule would not
> apply to bugfixes, and exceptions would be possible with the explicit
> approval of a maintainer.

The problem is that I disagree with your "Of course": the whole
difficulty is to decide which change falls in this category.

The problem is not that we don't follow the rule or that we don't have
such a rule.  It's that there's no hard-and-fast way to decide where
that rule should apply: it's a judgment call and often this call is
non-trivial (what one person calls "feature" qualifies as "bug fix" for
another, what should be a cosmetic change may end up unexpectedly
changing behavior), which is why sometimes it takes feedback from users
to realize we got it wrong.


        Stefan