Poll: is ~/.emacs auto-migration worthwhile? Or too dangerous?

[David Kastrup]

"Jason Spiro" <jasonspiro4 at gmail.com> writes:

> 2007/10/3, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:
>> Jason Spiro writes:
>>
>>  > This is a patch for a preference-corruption issue.  XEmacs (I use
>>  > xemacs-21.5.27)
> ...
>> [this patch is] probably not good
>> enough by itself, there are other paths to the same unfortunate result.
>
> 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.
>
> All:  do you think ~/.emacs auto-migration is worthwhile or not?
> Please write "yes" or "no" to the list.  If you want, add some
> comments.

No.  It is fine to search ~/.xemacs/init.el in preference to ~/.emacs.
And it is fine to tell the user when .emacs can't be loaded
successfully.  And it would also be fine if XEmacs offered to copy
.emacs to a not previously existing ~/.xemacs/init.el and tried
adapting it there.

But it clearly is "hands off" when it comes to actually modifying
.emacs itself.

XEmacs users might not feel strongly about this, but if trying out
XEmacs once can clobber a working Emacs setup without any obvious
warning, you are not going to make friends.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum