Re: 'M-o' ('facemap-keymap') has now been removed until March 10th 2021

[Paul W. Rankin]

> On 24 Mar 2021, at 11:07 pm, Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:
> 
>>> Unless I'm fundamentally missing something, the new command
>>> font-lock-update only duplicates the functionality of existing command
>>> font-lock-fontify-buffer, and adds some confusion...
>>> 
>> 
>> It does not duplicate the fonctionality, font-lock-fontify-buffer is bugged,
>> font-lock-update isn't (hopefully).  To see one of its bugs, open your
>> .emacs file, M-x font-lock-mode (which turns font-lock-mode off), M-x
>> font-lock-fontify-buffer.  Now change some characters: the
>> fontification remains.
> 
> BTW, the problem with the above is not whether this behavior is
> "expected" or not (after all, the behavior of known bugs is also
> arguably "expected").
> 
> The question is whether it's *desirable*, and some concrete use-cases to
> back up the claim would be very handy.
> 
> So far, the only use-case I know of is the one where font-lock-keywords
> is nil, so the "fontification" ends up *removing* faces.

There are two pretty separate issues here;

One is the nuances of font-lock vs text properties, on which we've gone a bit 
around in circles.

The other is much more trivial: that a command on the default C-x map should 
only do what its name implies (with no need to duplicate functionality of 
calling the mode itself).

The difficulty of the former has over-inflated the importance of the latter.