Re: Defaulting faces to inherit deemed harmful [was: Stealing a default face from a non-ELPA package]

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com>
> Date: Sun, 06 Mar 2022 05:38:55 +1100
> Cc: emacs-devel <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
> 
> The big use case your argument overlooks is the one I'm forced to deal
> with all the time. I have very specific requirements for face colours
> because of a vision impairment. Emacs is a constant frustration for me
> because of the number of faces which are defined. For example,
> list-display-faces shows over 1030 faces on my system!
> 
> Without inheritance, this means I have to customise a majority of those
> faces.

I don't see how inheritance would have made your problem smaller.  Are
you assuming that the inheriting faces will never override the colors
of their parent face?  If they do define their own colors (and most
faces do), inheritance won't help you to change any significant part
of the faces in fewer steps than you need to do now.

> Having over 1000 separate face definitions seems insane at one level,
> but I guess it does allow the ability for users to have ultimate
> customisation. However, if we are going to have so many faces, there
> really needs to be a mechanism which allows customisation which avoids
> having to have 1000 set-face-* or a huge set custom face block in your
> init file. This doesn't have to be via inheritance, but that seems to be
> a workable solution until someone suggests something better.

I don't think I understand the problem for which you are looking for a
solution.  Would you please state it clearly?  Or at least could you
describe what kind of customizations of each and every face do you
have to do for your specific requirements?  Without a clear idea of
the problem you are facing (pun intended), it is hard to say anything
intelligent regarding possible solutions.