[869] in athena10
Re: emacs cosmetic changes
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Price)
Wed Jan 21 00:03:47 2009
Date: Wed, 21 Jan 2009 00:01:50 -0500
From: Greg Price <price@MIT.EDU>
To: Tim Abbott <tabbott@mit.edu>
Cc: debathena@mit.edu
Message-ID: <20090121050149.GK3199@vinegar-pot.mit.edu>
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In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.2.00.0901062256480.17122@vinegar-pot.mit.edu>
On Tue, Jan 06, 2009 at 10:58:31PM -0500, Tim Abbott wrote:
> On Sat, 3 Jan 2009, Greg Price wrote:
> >I agree. We want to keep the items that are truly site-specific or
> >sysadmin-type configuration that we know the answer to. We should
> >drop the items that are really user preferences, which serve only to
> >confuse people in this era when many users have other experience with
> >Unix environments and Emacs.
> >
> >By that criterion, we should indeed drop these:
> >
> >>(setq require-final-newline t)
> >>(setq mouse-yank-at-point t)
> >>(blink-cursor-mode 0)
> >>(setq inhibit-local-variables t)
> >>(setq initial-major-mode …)
> >>(setq initial-scratch-message …)
> >>(setq bug-gnu-emacs "bugs@mit.edu")
>
> Any objections to removing these 7 emacs configuration options? I'll plan
> to commit this change this weekend if I don't hear anything.
To summarize the discussion that followed:
- no objections to ceasing to customize blink-cursor-mode,
inhibit-local-variables, initial-scratch-message, bug-gnu-emacs, and
a withdrawn objection for initial-major-mode
- mouse-yank-at-point is reflected in documentation, but it's already
the default in Emacs 22, which feisty and thereafter have, so we can
cease customizing it too
- without require-final-newline, a naive user editing their tcsh
dotfiles could get into a confusing situation.
This means we can remove at least six of these seven. For
require-final-newline, since we decided last summer that the next
class of new users will have bash as the default shell to match the
rest of the Linux world, the issue will affect only existing users
going back to their tcsh dotfiles from Athena 10 machines and without
much computing experience. Possibly this is still a wide enough class
to justify keeping the customization.
There were also two other settings I suggested keeping, earlier in the
thread, namely
> (setq mail-host-address "mit.edu")
> (setq tex-dvi-print-command "dvips")
We should report the bad default for tex-dvi-print-command in Debian,
expecting that it's probably an Emacs bug but the Debian Emacs
maintainer can figure out how to report it effectively. Then we can
change the comment to point to the BTS bug and remove it someday when
it's fixed.
Anders and Geoff suggested customizing mail-host-address properly for
all applications, not only Emacs, which would be an improvement.
Anders also suggested conditioning mail-host-address on
DEBATHENA_HOME_TYPE=afs.
Greg
