customize-face: [State]/"Show all display specs" sometimes fails.

[Alan Mackenzie]

In GNU Emacs 21.1.4 (i686-pc-linux-gnulibc1, X toolkit, Xaw3d scroll bars)
 of 2001-11-03 on acm
Important settings:
  value of $LC_ALL: nil
  value of $LC_COLLATE: nil
  value of $LC_CTYPE: en_GB
  value of $LC_MESSAGES: nil
  value of $LC_MONETARY: nil
  value of $LC_NUMERIC: nil
  value of $LC_TIME: nil
  value of $LANG: nil
  locale-coding-system: iso-latin-1
  default-enable-multibyte-characters: t

emacs -q --no-site-file
M-x load-library<CR>font-lock<CR>
M-x customize-face<CR>font-lock-string-face<CR>  ;; displays customisation
                                                 ;; buffer
Press <CR> on [State] then select 7 "Show all display specs"

This puts raw elisp on the screen rather than displaying a list of the
face specification for different terminal types.  Apart from the 11
boilerplate lines, the screen now displays:

Font Lock String Face:(sample) [Hide]
   [State]: this face is unchanged from its standard setting.
Font Lock mode face used to highlight strings.
Parent groups: [Font Lock Highlighting Faces]
Lisp expression:
((((type tty)
   (class color))
  (:foreground "green"))
 (((class grayscale)
   (background light))
  (:italic t :foreground "DimGray"))
 (((class grayscale)
   (background dark))
  (:italic t :foreground "LightGray"))
 (((class color)
   (background light))
  (:foreground "RosyBrown"))
 (((class color)
   (background dark))
  (:foreground "LightSalmon"))
 (t
  (:italic t)))

This behaviour is present on both a Linux tty and X.

*************************************************************************
Further observations by Samuel Padgett:

> Interesting...  It appears to show the Lisp expression for some faces
> and not for others.  For instance, font-lock-string-face shows the Lisp
> expression, but the default face doesn't.

> Selecting "Save for Future Sessions" first seems to work around the
> problem, though.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Munich, Germany)
Email: aacm@muuc.dee; to decode, wherever there is a repeated letter
(like "aa"), remove half of them (leaving, say, "a").