Subject: bug#17482: args-out-of-range when visiting foo.todo

From: Stephen Berman <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 14 May 2014 21:57:04 +0200

On Wed, 14 May 2014 13:46:33 -0400 Glenn Morris <[email-masked]> wrote:

> Stefan Monnier wrote:
>
>> Maybe a quick way to "reach" the design goal is to wrap the body of
>> todo-mode in a `with-demoted-errors'.
>
> It's better, but I think it's still not great if I visit blah.todo and
> get "args-out-of-range" as a message rather than an error.

I agree.  Moreover, if blah.todo is not empty but not a valid Todo file,
visiting it will raise a different error from a different part of the
code, so it would be necessary to have multiple uses of
`with-demoted-errors'.  And there's still the issue of why *.todo files
not in `todo-directory' should be in Todo mode.  And the only sensible
answer is: they shouldn't be.  So I am convinced that todo-mode should
not use auto-mode-alist: it's not needed and it only causes problems.  I
somehow became blinded by the idea that it's nice to be able to visit a
todo-mode file with `find-file' or from Dired and have it be in
todo-mode and display properly, but this was just a mistake and now I've
seen the light.  So unless there's a really good reason not to, I'll go
ahead and excise the use of auto-mode-alist; I'll post a patch for
review before committing.

Steve Berman