Re: Initial scratch message missing with desktop-save-mode on

[Richard Stallman]

    2001-11-03  Richard M. Stallman  <address@hidden>

      (command-line-1): Reorganize display of startup screen,
      to simplify the logic.  Use a temp buffer for it.

That sounds like a larger change.  Is your change a reversion of that
whole previous change, or just an adjustment of it?

    It looks to me that you simply decided not to insert the initial
    scratch message if another buffer had been selected during startup.

More precisely, if the init file leaves a different buffer selected.
That sounds right; shouldn't it be so?

Perhaps the right change is in desktop, to make it not select
any of the buffers it makes.

Or perhaps no change is needed.  If you resume a saved session, you
have presumably seen the scratch screen in the previous session.
So maybe it is right that it goes straight back to the status that was
saved, without showing the scratch screen again.

    (If I hadn't written the last sentence you quote above, would we be
    having this discussion?).

We would be having a discussion with a different starting point but
about the same questions.  Previous history would still come into it.


In general, people seem to be too quick to propose reverting a
previous change as a solution to a new problem.

It is not unusual that the change to fix one problem causes another.
Reverting the change would bring back the former problem.  Once in a
while, this is the right thing to do, but usually it is not.  Usually
the right thing to do is to look for a change that fixes the new
problem without bringing back the old one.

When we know what the problem was that motivated the previous fix, we
can specifically think about not bringing it back.  Otherwise, we have
to try to figure out what it was (perhaps guessing), or else just be
cautious, looking for a way to change the code to fix the new problem
without altering most of the effect of the previous fix.


It is also important to be clear about whether you are proposing
to revert a previous fix.  The words you wrote are

    It reverts the behaviour to what it was before rev 1.270

I took that to mean that you were reverting the patch, but now I can
see it could be interpreted differently, as just reverting a certain
aspect of the behavior.  Which meaning did you have in mind?