Re: [Emacs-trunk-diffs] Changes to emacs/etc/NEWS

[Richard Stallman]

    I don't find the merged behavior we have right now unclean at all:
    The `t' simply means: "default from now on".

That is quite unusual, for Emacs Lisp, and is certainly not what
t should mean.

    In contrast your proposal of nil would mean "default even for those things
    written before".

Right; the ordering of a default definition and a specific definition
that inherits from that default should not make any difference.

    Furthermore by splitting the thing into t and nil you'll not only make the
    code bigger,

A small amount of implementation code more or less is a minor issue
when the question is one of making things clear to users.

               , but you'll also lose flexibility since it won't be possible to
    specify a default for a subset of the face spec.

How much is that flexibility worth, in practice?
Which cases use it?