Stop fiddling with my preferences

[Roland Lutz]

I've been using Emacs for quite a while, and I think it's a great program. 
Sure, things work differently than in most newly-written GUI applications, 
but at least for me, they work *better*.

For the past few months, however, each time I upgraded to a new version of 
Emacs, something in the behavior changed.  I had to figure out each time 
what it was that caused the change and how to compensate for it.  This 
usually took me an hour or more since it isn't easily documented and most 
solutions suggested on the web have unwanted side-effects.  Right now, the 
compatibility section in my .emacs file reads:

(set 'x-select-enable-clipboard nil)
(set 'x-select-enable-primary t)
(set 'select-active-regions nil)
(set 'mouse-drag-copy-region t)
(set 'delete-active-region nil)
(set 'electric-indent-chars (remq ?\n electric-indent-chars))

This sort of behavior changes is common among browsers and proprietary 
operating systems, but does this make it appropriate for Emacs?  One of 
the reasons I'm using mature software is exactly that I *don't* have to be 
worried with each new version that ESC won't stop playing animated GIFs 
any more, etc.

I'm not arguing about defaults (I think they shouldn't change without a 
good reason--other than personal preference--either, but that's an 
entirely different story) but that I don't want them to change once I've 
got used to how Emacs works.

How about not changing the defaults but shipping an updated skeleton 
.emacs file instead?

How about a command like (use-defaults VERSION)?

Also, I'd appreciate if the history of user-visible changes included the 
commands necessary to restore the previous behavior.

Roland