Subject: bug#21695: 25.0.50; Change most occurrences of `setq' in Emacs manual to `customize-set-variable'? Really?

From: Richard Stallman <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 01 Sep 2021 23:42:04 -0400

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  > Searching emacs 27.2 elisp source I find about 400 hits for :set.

That is more than I expected.  However, there around 8000 defcustoms
in master as of May 11, and only 462 instances of :set.

Telling people to use customize-set-variable for all 8000 of them
feels like the tail wagging the dog.

I have a feeling that most of those 462 with :set actually require
that people use customize-set-variable to set them in the init file.
I suspect that, for most of them, :set is meant to handle the case
where you change the setting once the feature is already in use.

I think that if we eliminate these, we will get a much smaller
number of exceptions, and we could find a nicer way to handle them.

But even with 462 exceptions, it could be easy enough to warn about
setting one of those in .emacs with setq.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)