Subject: Re: bug#20241: 25.0.50; `setq' with only one argument

From: Artur Malabarba <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2015 19:26:16 +0000

On 24 Nov 2015 6:04 pm, "Alan Mackenzie" <[email-masked]> wrote:
> There were, after all, only five uses of this
> "feature" in the entire Emacs code base.  And one of these was in
> .../obsolete.

A few months ago Stefan changed save-excursion to no longer restore the
mark. IIRC (though I may be forgetting), there were zero uses of this in
the codebase, and he even asked about it on the list and nobody said "I use
this".
Still, after the change was applied, some issues came up on a couple of
highly used packages out there, and my guess is that more will come up once
25 is released.

I'm not speaking against that change. It was a good change because it fixed
more problems than it created. And the same is true here. This change will
be good.

However, if there are 5 uses of it in the core, then it's likely there are
30 or 100 uses of it in the wild. This change _will_ break things. So it is
my opinion that it should go in the master branch. The feature freeze
exists for a reason.

The emacs 25 branch should only get the warning, instead. A warning really
goes a long way, and it doesn't break anything.