RE: Honoring traditional defaults [was: Transient Mark Mode onbydefault]

[Drew Adams]

>  > It's interesting (and a bit ironic), because the same approach you
>  > propose for Emacs traditionalists to turn back the clock to a prior
>  > Emacs release (Please just make it work like before!) could also be
>  > used to provide alternative out-of-the-box experiences for Emacs
>  > newbies (and others).
> 
> It is not that easy, and the proof is trivial: "Please make it work
> like before" is a well-defined specification.  "Provide alternative
> experiences" is not, as the moribund "custom themes" stuff shows.

To define a given set of settings, we do not need a well-defined specification.
We need only (1) decide on the mechanism for implementing  sets of settings and
(2) agree on the settings to set and their values.

For options and faces, applying custom-set-variables to an options alist and
similarly for custom-set-faces could be enough for #1. Some customization can be
more complex than setting options and faces, but it's not clear yet that we need
any predefined "skins" that provide such complex customizations.

Wrt #2: Individual preference sets do not need to set the same settings. Any set
of preferences is a candidate for consideration.