Subject: Re: bug#38696: "If you edit it by hand, you could mess it up"

From: Richard Stallman <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 23 Dec 2019 23:13:47 -0500

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  > But that's not the likeliest scenario.  The real,
  > more likely problem is that you make a change to
  > this code and later Customize overwrites your
  > change - and you might not be aware of that.

We could make Customize detect hand-editing by looking at the value
in .emacs and determining that it doesn't have a format Customize
could ever write?

Or we could the comment say, "If you want to edit this value by hand,
delete this comment."  Customize could interpret the absence of
that comment as meaning the value has been hand-edited.

Either way, Customize could then report a problem and offer a choice
of (1) deleting the value in the file, or (2) quitting.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://gnu.org, https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)