Question about handling file deletion

[Stephen Berman]

If a package provides functionality for deleting files used by it, is it
considered a bug in the package if it does not handle the situation
where a user deletes such files using a command outside of the package
and this causes errors when using the package which don't arise if the
package file-deletion functionality is used?  I'm faced with this issue
in the new version of todo-mode.el (see bug#14688).  If someone deletes
a todo file using e.g. Dired and then gets an error in Todo mode and
reports it as a bug, is it kosher for me reply "If it hurts, don't do
that.  Use todo-delete-file." and close the bug?  (That command doesn't
actually exist yet, but I think it will be much easier to implement than
trying to handle the result of deleting todo files outside of Todo
mode.)

Steve Berman