Re: always put Customizations in `custom-file', never in `user-init-file'

[Lennart Borgman (gmail)]

Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> Our experience says that automatic "after" loading is fine for 99% of
> users (that's all we actually provide in a released version), and that
> "before" is satisfactory for the rest.  (There may be users we haven't
> encountered who *need* finer control, but the fact that in the 7 years
> since December 2000 we haven't encountered *one* suggests there are
> very few.)  The reason I suggest providing the "before" option is that
> I know there are use cases for it.  I have never heard of anybody who
> *needed* it loaded in the middle of the init file.  I *have* helped
> debug problems that happened because customizations were loaded in the
> middle of the init file rather than at the appropriate end, though.

Ah, now I think I remember. A good way to handle the load sequence could be:

  1) load .emacs
  2) if .emacs did not load custom-file then do that
     immediately after .emacs.

That solves the problem with the loading sequence with very little 
trouble (I believe). Those users which want to use the values from 
custom-set-variables in their .emacs will have to learn to insert

  (load custom-file)

in their .emacs but I would expect that to be easy for those users.

But, Stephen, maybe you see some problem with this?