Re: position on changing defaults?

[David Kastrup]

Dan Nicolaescu <address@hidden> writes:

> One reason to ask if there's a policy in this direction is that
> absolutely ANY change will make someone scream bloody murder.  (just
> remember that there was resistance even to turning on
> global-font-lock-mode by default, which is something that the vast
> majority of users want).  And people that oppose change tend to be
> extremely vocal.

You certainly sport a selective memory.  The reason
global-font-lock-mode was not turned on by default was that there were
large performance problems in a number of cases.  Those were addressed
by and by, and when global-font-lock-mode was in a shape where it would
not obliterate the usability of Emacs for large pretty standard use
cases, then it was finally adopted.

It would not have been an improvement if global-font-lock-mode would
have been made the default before this had been tackled satisfactorily.
Having the font-lock proponents actually work hard on making the code
acceptable to those who don't crave font-lock-mode that much but need
tolerable performance for large cases: this has been very important and
contributed to the quality of Emacs code.

We don't want to get into the situation where the editor gets bogged
down by a legacy of great half-baked and partly unmaintained features.
This is to some degree what I perceive as having happened with XEmacs.
Getting features to a full-quality state before enabling them is only
sane.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum