Re: defcustoms in style/*.el

* David Kastrup (2005-03-08) writes:

> Ralf Angeli <[email protected]> writes:
>
>> * Reiner Steib (2005-03-07) writes:
>>
>>> On Sun, Mar 06 2005, Reiner Steib wrote:
>>>
>>>> Unless other people object, I will do the following: Move the
>>>> defcustoms from style/{amsmath,beamer,csquotes,emp}.el and the
>>>> graphicx and beamer related defcustoms from latex.el to a new file.  I
>>>> suggest the name `tex-style.el' although it affects only LaTeX and not
>>>> plain TeX style files (separation of TeX and LaTeX would be overkill
>>>> here, I think).
>>>
>>> Done.  Please holler if it breaks something.
>>
>> Does my heart count?
>
> I think it reasonable to collect customizations automatically.  It
> does not seem like a good idea to bind them into tex-site.el itself
> but rather put them into a file loaded by it, so that one can
> regenerate them in case of need.
>
> Apart from the automatic regeneration, this seems to be what Reiner
> did.

The thing I don't like about putting the defcustoms into a separate
file is that they are not near the actual code they are used in
anymore.  This may lead to inconveniences during coding and is
somewhat contrary to the rather decentralized approach we have with
the style files.

I'd rather like to have this solved with autoload.  But as we saw,
Customize is not able to build a buffer with autoloaded defcustoms as
they don't provide information to which group they belong.  This is a
missing feature of the autoload mechanism.  In this context Reiner's
solution may be a workable compromise but that does not mean I have to
like it.

With regard to promising not to object to this change I talked too
much already, so I'll better shut up now.

-- 
Ralf