shell unmaintainable

[Ilya N. Golubev]

Jerry James <Jerry.James at usu.edu> writes:

> Can't you just stick with the officially released packages?

No.  Reasons are too complex.

> I don't see anything else in font-lock.el that makes an obtrusive change
> to the user's environment.

When something in that package did, did not bother to document it
fully, just remembered to avoid loading it.  Even 

(add-hook 'find-file-hooks 'font-lock-set-defaults t)

may be quite harmful, depending on how much `font-lock-set-defaults'
hogs the cpu.  If it hogs much, being <sophisticated> helps little.

> As for the byte compiling issue, (require 'auto-autoloads) is not the
> right thing to do, because there are lots of auto-autoloads.el files,
> one per package in fact.

Right.  Is not core `lisp' directory first in `load-path' when
`-no-autoloads -vanilla' are specified, when compiling packages in
batch mode?  If can rely on that, still can do so.  Will load right
`auto-autoloads.el' in batch mode and have it already loaded in
regular interactive one.

> (2) anybody who needs to compile their own due to
> maintaining local variations should be sophisticated enough to deal with
> a change in find-file-hooks.

Disagree.  He may be even sophisticated, but he has time only for his
own modifications, not for meddling with some nearly unpredictable
effects like these.  Leaving misfeatures like this is a recipe to have
actual work never done.