Subject: bug#44689: 28.0.50; Use appropriate face for Flymake unknown backend

From: João Távora <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2020 09:20:17 +0000

On Tue, Nov 17, 2020 at 5:38 AM Protesilaos Stavrou <[email-masked]>
wrote:

> > I'm not sure why it's useful to draw attention to this bit in the mode
> > line, though.  Is that something users would find useful to have their
> > attentions drawn to?
>
> Perhaps João can answer your question (in cc).

Thanks. I dunno, really.  That '?' is placed whenever Flymake has
been activated but no suitable backend has been found, or no
backend has been found to answer suitably. This is an abnormal
situation.  It points to some misconfiguration, in principle. Does
that merit "immediate attention"?  I'd say "some attention", but
I'm ignorant of the policy and the associated face here, so I'll leave
this hair-splitting to you, and you have my blessing for choosing
a different face or even no face at all.

> 'mode-line-emphasis' just feels like a more suitable choice for a face,
> if emphasis in the mode line is the ultimate goal.

The ultimate goal is to have Flymake working.  The `?` is something
you or some package you're using has misconfigured.

Lars, this reminds me of a bug report (completely forgot the number),
where the mode-line's indicators would become configurable via some
"format string" mini-language, or something like that.  Maybe we should
take that up again, and maybe abandon the "format string" and make it
use the same kind of language used in mode-line-format itself. Regardless
of the simpler decision in this bug, it should allow, in principle, that
demanding users modify Flymake's mode-line indications to their
liking.

João