bug#23783: Minor feature fixes and enhancements [Was: bug#23783: Emacs 25: Changing font-lock-maximum-decoration doesn't work.]

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hello, Eli.

On Sat, Jun 18, 2016 at 08:37:32PM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2016 17:19:03 +0000
> > Cc: 23783@debbugs.gnu.org
> > From: Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>

[ .... ]

> In general, I find that lately we make too frequently the mistake of
> messing with low-level infrastructure for some marginal improvement,
> and then have to invest/waste lots of time and releases to deal with
> the fallout of unintended consequences, broken use cases, etc.  I
> intend to object to such changes in the future.  This seems just such
> a case: a minor annoyance whose "fixing" runs a very real risk of
> breaking a lot of important functionalities.

I'd ask you to consider things very carefully indeed before adopting
such a policy.  It is minor changes like these, a very great number of
them, that have made Emacs as usable as it is.

Sometime, fire up Emacs-21, and compare with a modern Emacs just how
usable it isn't.  Perhaps even more dramatic, fire up XEmacs.  I predict
you would find it irritating, and the things that would irritate you
would be just the lack of the little improvements that you are proposing
now to object to.

For example, in XEmacs, the C-x 4 bindings split the screen with the
windows above eachother, which is suboptimal on a modern wide screen.
Yes, it's nothing earth-shatteringly bad, it's just not quite right.  If
you do a batch-byte-compile, the error and warning messages are partially
drowned out by low-content messages about "compiling foo.el" and "Writing
foo.elc".  Again, nothing you can't get around, but Emacs doesn't do that
any more.  These are just two of the many, many, marginal improvements
Emacs has made in the last decade or so.

I don't think we should stop making these small improvements.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).