Re: Emacs-CVS and abbrevs

[Stefan Monnier]

>     The reason is that sml-mode defines a few abbrevs and does not
>     mark them as `system' for the simple reason that this extra argument
>     didn't exist before Emacs-CVS.
> Marking them as "system" is the right thing to do.

But all the packages out there that define their own abbrevs won't
change it just like that.  There's a backward compatibility issue.

Also it's not going to be "obvious bugs to fix": after all, even though
I've known about both the save-abbrevs default change and the new system
arg for a long time, but it took me until now to realize what was going
on with sml-mode (especially because I tend to only *look* at sml files
these days, so I only get the "save .emacs_abbrevs" question later when
saving an unrelated file).
Also the "save .emacs_abbrevs" question seemed to pop up
non-deterministically (it was just an impression, of course, I know better),
so people will just think it's an Emacs bug.

>     I think we should change it so that abbrevs are not considered
>     modified whenever you call define-abbrev, but only if you call
>     one of the interactive interfaces to it.
> 
> That would lead to incorrect results from other commands that
> call define-abbrev to define a user abbrev.

Like which ones ?


        Stefan