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

[David Kastrup]

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

> SL Baur writes:
>
>  > There are exactly 0 valid usages of it and an apparently infinite number
>  > of harmful ones.
>
> Nonsense.  Custom is badly broken in this respect; it simply
> overwrites anything it can find, globally.  Most of the time it
> doesn't cause any problems, but when there *are* problems the
> failure mode is catastrophic.  The point of the automatic migration
> is to get people to use a separate ~/.xemacs/custom.el, and
> apparently it's been fairly successful.  As a symptom, "Why doesn't
> my handwritten (custom-set-something ...)  form DTRT?" used to be a
> FAQ, now it's very rare; I've seen it recently, but the time before
> that was literally years ago.  Automatic migration was a good idea
> and still is.

Isn't the purpose of a poll _getting_ rather than _pushing_ opinions?

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum