Balloon help and AUCTeX

[David Kastrup]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen at xemacs.org> writes:

>>>>>> "David" == David Kastrup <dak at gnu.org> writes:
>
>     David> and you'll have preview-latex users at least as a test
>     David> audience.  And the problem reports will wind up at your own
>     David> door.
>
> They never have ended up at XEmacs in the past.

It is not that I have not given rants and reports previously.  But
anyway, if you enable stuff by default, we'll point anybody
complaining to you.  It is then no longer the "mistake" of AUCTeX
development to enable balloon help.

> Do you have a reason to suppose that will change now?
>
>     David> Enabling it in AUCTeX by default will, even if I take
>     David> your word as gospel, cause trouble for all users with
>     David> older versions, presumably also XEmacs 21.4.
>
> Nobody has yet suggested that.  There are still 1.25 bugs
> outstanding, which I for one would like to try to fix, or at least
> make less annoying, before changing defaults anywhere.
>
> By the way, balloon-help is a packaged library; none of the fixes
> require changes to XEmacs core.[1] All users of XEmacs 21.x (x >= 1)
> need to do is update to the improved version of the edit-utils
> package once it is released.
>
> Footnotes: 
> [1]  Of course fixing a crash does, but without a stack trace, there
> will be no fix in the short run.

You won't get stack traces for functionality that is disabled by
default and mostly useful to beginners.

The people that would be able to send useful reports and debug the
problem are not the kind of people who would think it useful enough to
enable it.  And those who would benefit from it usually don't have
enough skills or knowledge to actually enable it themselves.

Enable it by default, and you'll get the reports.  And if you don't
get any, the change presumably was good.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum