Subject: Re: bug#54993: 28.1; Editing etc/NEWS on master with Emacs 28 signals an error

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 18 Apr 2022 12:27:18 +0300

> From: Michael Albinus <[email-masked]>
> Cc: Lars Ingebrigtsen <[email-masked]>,  [email-masked]
> Date: Mon, 18 Apr 2022 10:40:04 +0200
> 
> FTR, I find the new emacs-news-mode very convenient. Hiding it in
> private customizations would remove its convenience.

??? How's that?  You make that customization once, and then get to
enjoy the convenience happily ever after.  What am I missing?

The customization I had in mind is to tell Emacs to turn on
emacs-news-mode when you visit a file called "NEWS".

> What about
> 
> --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
> Local variables:
> coding: utf-8
> eval: (or (fboundp 'emacs-news-mode) (defalias 'emacs-news-mode 'outline-mode))
> mode: emacs-news
> paragraph-separate: "[ 	]*$"
> end:
> --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---
> 
> It requires you to confirm the eval form, but this is the price when you
> edit etc/NEWS from master with an older Emacs version.

The need to confirm the eval form is an annoyance, because, unlike
some people, I actually read the message and think about it before I
confirm, and that takes time and is a distraction from the main job,
which is to make some change in NEWS.

Really, I very much object to this disruption of my long-time workflow
of working on Emacs, which is that I almost always use the released
version of Emacs and not the development version.  I can work around
this, but the need to come up with a good workaround is in itself
almost an insult.  And it goes against the basic principle that people
who want a feature should bear the burden of having it.