Region undo is rather unusable

[David Kastrup]

Please write in English if possible, because the Emacs maintainers
usually do not have translators to read other languages for them.

Your bug report will be posted to the address@hidden mailing list.

Please describe exactly what actions triggered the bug
and the precise symptoms of the bug:

Take a buffer and do a dozen editing operations, insertion, deletion,
stuff like that, on various points of the buffer.  The description for
undo says:

    undo is an interactive compiled Lisp function in `simple.el'.
    It is bound to C-_, <undo>, C-/, <menu-bar> <edit> <undo>.
    (undo &optional ARG)

    Undo some previous changes.
    Repeat this command to undo more changes.
    A numeric argument serves as a repeat count.

    In Transient Mark mode when the mark is active, only undo changes within
    the current region.  Similarly, when not in Transient Mark mode, just C-u
    as an argument limits undo to changes within the current region.

Now put a region into transient mark mode (mark one end with C-SPC
and the other with C-u C-x C-x).  Try repeated undo with C-/.  The
problem is that after each undo, point gets moved to some wild other
place, and so the region changes from undo to undo.

This makes it impossibly inconvenient to undo repetitive changes in a
region.  But the whole _point_ of this feature is _multiple_ undos,
namely undoing something further back in the history without affecting
changes done later.

So for all _practical_ purposes, the implementation of the feature is
not useful.

I think that if there is an active region, Emacs should try hard to
retain point at the proper end of this region when making an undo.

In GNU Emacs 22.0.50.39 (i686-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 2.8.17)
 of 2006-06-05 on lola
X server distributor `The X.Org Foundation', version 11.0.70000000
configured using `configure '--prefix=/usr/local/emacs-21' '--with-gtk' 
'--without-toolkit-scroll-bars''

Important settings:
  value of $LC_ALL: nil
  value of $LC_COLLATE: nil
  value of $LC_CTYPE: nil
  value of $LC_MESSAGES: nil
  value of $LC_MONETARY: nil
  value of $LC_NUMERIC: nil
  value of $LC_TIME: nil
  value of $LANG: en_US.UTF-8
  locale-coding-system: utf-8
  default-enable-multibyte-characters: t

Major mode: Message

Minor modes in effect:
  shell-dirtrack-mode: t
  mml-mode: t
  TeX-PDF-mode: t
  desktop-save-mode: t
  iswitchb-mode: t
  minibuffer-electric-default-mode: t
  tooltip-mode: t
  mouse-wheel-mode: t
  menu-bar-mode: t
  file-name-shadow-mode: t
  global-font-lock-mode: t
  font-lock-mode: t
  blink-cursor-mode: t
  unify-8859-on-decoding-mode: t
  unify-8859-on-encoding-mode: t
  utf-translate-cjk-mode: t
  auto-compression-mode: t
  line-number-mode: t
  abbrev-mode: t

Recent messages:
Undo! [2 times]
Redo! [2 times]
Mark set
Transient-mark-mode temporarily enabled
Undo in region!
Mark set
Transient-mark-mode temporarily enabled
Undo in region!
Quit
Loading emacsbug...done

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum