Poll: is ~/.emacs auto-migration worthwhile? Or too dangerous? (was: Re: [PATCH] fix corruption of ~/.emacs when trying to migrate an init file XEmacs can't fully load)

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Jason Spiro writes:

 > OK.  So auto-migration corrupts some .emacs files.  I bet this makes
 > some users dislike XEmacs even though XEmacs made a backup of .emacs
 > first.

No, unfortunately it's not automigration really, it's custom itself.
Most of the paths to corruption I have seen reported involve
automigration, but the basic problem is that custom doesn't take any
precautions when writing a new custom file, period.  If (as in GNU
Emacs) the init file and the custom file are the same, you can lose an
awful lot.