bug#49050: 26.1; The INSANITY of setting a default font size in EMACS and saving it for future instances.

[Jeff B]

I've been using EMACS for 35 or 40 years now and EVERY DAMN TIME
I SWITCH SYSTEMS I HAVE TO FIGURE OUT ALL OVER AGAIN HOW TO
CHANGE THE DAMN FONT SIZE SO THAT IT'S BIG ENOUGH THAT I CAN
READ IT  *AND*  SAVE THAT SIZE SO THAT IT WILL BE THERE THE
NEXT TIME I START UP EMACS.  The mix of fonts with all their different
attributes may be fine for persons who want to play games with
appearance, but most of us just want to be able to set the font to be
the right size REGARDLESS of all the fancy colors and stuff of the
various modes & themes.  Yes I have used OPTIONS/SET-DEFAULT-FONT
and it is simple enough to increase the size there but nothing I have
tried on this latest system, shown below, and all prior systems, has
allowed me to set the size and save it so that I get it back when I
restart EMACS, and it makes me nuts.  All this font stuff is so complex
that it amounts to being a BUG for the ordinary user, especially those
of us who have eye troubles.  :-(

-------------------------------

In GNU Emacs 26.1 (build 2, arm-unknown-linux-gnueabihf, GTK+ Version 
3.24.5)
 of 2021-02-06, modified by Debian built on bm-wb-04
Windowing system distributor 'The X.Org Foundation', version 11.0.12004000
System Description:    Raspbian GNU/Linux 10 (buster)


Configured using:
 'configure --build arm-linux-gnueabihf --prefix=/usr
 --sharedstatedir=/var/lib --libexecdir=/usr/lib
 --localstatedir=/var/lib --infodir=/usr/share/info
 --mandir=/usr/share/man --enable-libsystemd --with-pop=yes
 
--enable-locallisppath=/etc/emacs:/usr/local/share/emacs/26.1/site-lisp:/usr/local/share/emacs/site-lisp:/usr/share/emacs/26.1/site-lisp:/usr/share/emacs/site-lisp
 --with-sound=alsa --without-gconf --with-mailutils --build
 arm-linux-gnueabihf --prefix=/usr --sharedstatedir=/var/lib
 --libexecdir=/usr/lib --localstatedir=/var/lib
 --infodir=/usr/share/info --mandir=/usr/share/man --enable-libsystemd
 --with-pop=yes
 
--enable-locallisppath=/etc/emacs:/usr/local/share/emacs/26.1/site-lisp:/usr/local/share/emacs/site-lisp:/usr/share/emacs/26.1/site-lisp:/usr/share/emacs/site-lisp
 --with-sound=alsa --without-gconf --with-mailutils --with-x=yes
 --with-x-toolkit=gtk3 --with-toolkit-scroll-bars 'CFLAGS=-g -O2
 -fdebug-prefix-map=/build/emacs-WuElUP/emacs-26.1+1=. 
-fstack-protector-strong
 -Wformat -Werror=format-security -Wall' 'CPPFLAGS=-Wdate-time
 -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2' LDFLAGS=-Wl,-z,relro'

Configured features:
XPM JPEG TIFF GIF PNG RSVG IMAGEMAGICK SOUND GPM DBUS GSETTINGS NOTIFY
ACL LIBSELINUX GNUTLS LIBXML2 FREETYPE M17N_FLT LIBOTF XFT ZLIB
TOOLKIT_SCROLL_BARS GTK3 X11 THREADS LIBSYSTEMD LCMS2

Important settings:
  value of $LC_ALL: en_US.UTF-8
  value of $LANG: en_US.UTF-8
  locale-coding-system: utf-8-unix

Major mode: Fundamental

Minor modes in effect:
  tooltip-mode: t
  global-eldoc-mode: t
  electric-indent-mode: t
  mouse-wheel-mode: t
  tool-bar-mode: t
  menu-bar-mode: t
  file-name-shadow-mode: t
  global-font-lock-mode: t
  blink-cursor-mode: t
  auto-composition-mode: t
  auto-encryption-mode: t
  auto-compression-mode: t
  buffer-read-only: t
  column-number-mode: t
  line-number-mode: t
  transient-mark-mode: t

Load-path shadows:
/usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/rst hides 
/usr/share/emacs/26.1/lisp/textmodes/rst

Features:
(shadow sort mail-extr emacsbug message rmc puny seq byte-opt gv
bytecomp byte-compile cconv dired dired-loaddefs format-spec rfc822 mml
mml-sec password-cache epa derived epg epg-config gnus-util rmail
rmail-loaddefs mm-decode mm-bodies mm-encode mail-parse rfc2231
mailabbrev gmm-utils mailheader sendmail rfc2047 rfc2045 ietf-drums
mm-util mail-prsvr mail-utils misearch multi-isearch warnings elec-pair
cc-mode cc-fonts easymenu cc-guess cc-menus cc-cmds cc-styles cc-align
cc-engine cc-vars cc-defs cl-loaddefs cl-lib time-stamp jka-compr
time-date mule-util tooltip eldoc electric uniquify ediff-hook vc-hooks
lisp-float-type mwheel term/x-win x-win term/common-win x-dnd tool-bar
dnd fontset image regexp-opt fringe tabulated-list replace newcomment
text-mode elisp-mode lisp-mode prog-mode register page menu-bar
rfn-eshadow isearch timer select scroll-bar mouse jit-lock font-lock
syntax facemenu font-core term/tty-colors frame cl-generic cham georgian
utf-8-lang misc-lang vietnamese tibetan thai tai-viet lao korean
japanese eucjp-ms cp51932 hebrew greek romanian slovak czech european
ethiopic indian cyrillic chinese composite charscript charprop
case-table epa-hook jka-cmpr-hook help simple abbrev obarray minibuffer
cl-preloaded nadvice loaddefs button faces cus-face macroexp files
text-properties overlay sha1 md5 base64 format env code-pages mule
custom widget hashtable-print-readable backquote dbusbind inotify lcms2
dynamic-setting system-font-setting font-render-setting move-toolbar gtk
x-toolkit x multi-tty make-network-process emacs)

Memory information:
((conses 8 120394 14211)
 (symbols 24 22871 1)
 (miscs 20 117 280)
 (strings 16 34908 1632)
 (string-bytes 1 1061996)
 (vectors 12 16704)
 (vector-slots 4 550054 15338)
 (floats 8 52 387)
 (intervals 28 312 4)
 (buffers 536 14))