Subject: bug#66780: [PATCH] Improve rectangle-mark-mode when transient-mark-mode is off

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 28 Oct 2023 19:47:34 +0300

> From: Jens Schmidt <[email-masked]>
> Cc: Stefan Kangas <[email-masked]>,  [email-masked]
> Date: Sat, 28 Oct 2023 18:36:49 +0200
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]> writes:
> 
> > And that is something that doesn't automatically follows from your
> > personal preferences and use patterns.  It needs more serious
> > justifications.
> 
> It's not only my "personal preferences and use patterns".  See Sean's
> bug#42663 plus Michael's bug#16066.  So every now and then somebody
> having transient-mark-mode switched off comes across this.

Yes, I know.  But that doesn't remove the need to justify a change to
Emacs.

> > Why do you insist on making these changes in upstream, to
> > affect everyone else [...]
> 
> It's not "everyone else".  My solution of adding a conditional minor
> mode lighter has been designed to specifically affect (== help) only
> those that do not use permanent transient-mark-mode.

It's one more minor mode with one more lighter.  So yes, it affects
everyone else.

> > You found something that you'd
> > like to fix for your own reasons.
> 
> Really?  Go through all that effort of carefully describing the issue
> and discussing with you just for my own reasons, where I have (indeed)
> fixed that issue in my .emacs in 10mins?
> 
> > Once again I ask: why not
> > make these changes, or others that you propose, in your own local
> > Emacs, and be done?
>                       ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> 
> That's a rather discouraging request.  Is is somewhat in contrast to
> this statements from the README:
> 
>   You may encounter bugs in this release.  If you do, please report
>   them; your bug reports are valuable contributions to the FSF, since
>   they allow us to notice and fix problems on machines we don't have, or
>   in code we don't use often.
> 
> So are you asking me not to file any bugs?

Of course not.  But please don't expect us to agree with and accept
every change you suggest.  Each one of them is judged on its own
right, and not all of them will find their way into Emacs.  Sometimes,
we will not even agree that what you consider a bug is indeed a bug.

> Or, in other words: Which of my change requests so far had truly the
> quality to affect me and only me?

Are you asking about the 3 suggestions in this bug report?  Then I
think I already answered that: the first 2 I tend not to accept, the
last one I think could be accepted, and I'd like to hear opinions of
others about it.