Re: Application resource storage

[chad <chadpbrown@gmail.com>]

An idea:

On Tue, 29 Mar 2011 21:34:05 +0200 Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> wrote: 

LMI> But if the question is of the kind "do you want to use port 587 when
LMI> connecting to smtp.gmail.com?", then that doesn't really map
LMI> straightforwardly to a simple variable.  It might map to an alist of
LMI> some kind, but the user may set that alist somewhere else, which 
LMI> makes all this kind of tricky.

I wonder if this isn't the key insight -- for all that I'm not a big fan, custom does a decent job of trying to do all of the user-input interactions. The trickiness seems to come in when something is set both directly and via custom. If the custom machinery were to add a flag or slot to a variable claiming it as custom-set, then we could at least warn the user that a custom setting is being overridden, potentially confirming the change, offering to push the change into custom, etc.

If we added such a check to custom and to user-facing variable setters, then the performance hit should be negligible. In other words, things like set-variable would check to see if its argument was `customized', and calling M-x custom would check to see if any of `its' variables had been changed.

Worth the trouble?
*Chad