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

[Nelson Ferreira]

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"David" == David Kastrup <dak at gnu.org>  wrote:

  David> "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.

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

I've always seen (political) polls being used to push opinions, by way
of the methodology, so I guess it is not unheard of :-)

[...]

BTW I have no opinion, because ever since XEmacs 19.14 I have no .emacs,
and I remember at the time it basically did the right thing (from what I
read mostly because I did not use custom at the time)

- -- 
Nelson Ferreira 
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