Subject: Re: bug#35044: 25.2; Description of "disappearing" faces (Emacs Manual)

From: Noam Postavsky <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Apr 2019 08:49:41 -0400

Sebastian Urban <[email-masked]> writes:

>> I'm unclear how this will help a beginner user.  It sounds like
>> it's describing a potential source of buggy behaviour.
>
> Well this is why I didn't want to write it, also it's more like
> concept/idea rather than a patch.  Again new users should not be
> surprised by this behaviour, so a line of warning would be nice, but
> if it sounds like description of bug...  Maybe a footnote "This is not
> a bug!" at the end (yes, this is a joke).

I mean, new users *should* probably be surprised by this behaviour which
is in fact a bug.  And elisp authors (ideally) should not write code
with bugs, hence my suggestion to update the elisp manual to give
stronger advice about how to avoid doing that (for this particular class
of bug).

>> Not sure what you mean by "hardcoded" faces.
>
> Quote (for example) RET character (C-q RET), then do 'describe-char'
> on it and you'll get something like "hardcoded face: escape-glyph" in
> the description.

I wasn't aware of this, looks like "hardcoded" refers to faces applied
directly by the display engine to particular characters.

> ---
>
> About that change 'face -> 'font-lock-face in table.el, I would
> probably need to report another bug/wishlist thing, am I correct?

Yeah, it would be neater to have a separate report.  Though you can just
send it in this same thread if you like.