Subject: RE: bug#6689: 24.0.50; No primary selection

From: "Drew Adams" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 4 Aug 2010 23:51:16 -0700

> The changes that were made have been discussed numerous times in 
> response to user complaints over many years.

Good to hear.  In which thread can I find a proposal summarizing the changes
being made?  Point me to the proposal and discussion of the proposed changes,
please.  I would love to see where we're headed.  I cannot tell the bugs from
the intentional changes.

Eli says that the intended changes are not for Windows anyway, which is
reassuring.  And he says they are obvious to people familiar with Posix
selection - and as a consequence of that there was _no_ proposal or discussion.
You apparently don't agree.  So where's the proposal?

> and now we have ONE user

There are several bug reports regarding recent selection changes, only two of
which I submitted (including this one).

> insisting that it be put back to the broken state it was in before

Seems that Yidong and Eli and... have also acknowledged that at least some of
the recent selection changes are bugs - at least on Windows, which is the only
platform I've spoken of from experience with the recent builds.

> I'm not sure I've seen you offer a reason 
> other than "it changed therefore it is now 'unusable'".

Perhaps you need to read again - and learn to quote fairly while you're at it.
I gave specific recipes, and others have agreed that what I described are bugs.
And some have been fixed.

Do you find it a _feature_ that you can no longer copy from one Emacs session
and yank to another (with the mouse)?  Do you find it a _feature_ that mouse
selection cannot be followed by `C-y' to yank the selected text (that has been
fixed, I believe - except cross-session).  Do you find it a _feature_ that mouse
selection followed by `M-w' raises an error "No primary selection" (that too has
been fixed, I believe).  And so on.  Were those changes "discussed numerous
times in response to user complaints over many years"?

I don't think so.  I think they are bugs.  Which is OK.  But I was not sure they
were not intentional changes until others confirmed that.  Why?  Because I know
that there are some intentional changes being made wrt selection, and I do not
know what they are (no proposal or summary of the changes to be made, AFAICT).
I am relieved to hear from Eli that they will not (ultimately) affect Windows,
but I did not know that at first.

What more do you need than such bug recipes in the way of _reasons_ to fix these
things?  There are clearly some "wrinkles to be ironed out".  And they are
getting ironed out, which means that we are progressively returning to the way
things were (on Windows).  Why do you suppose we would be returning to that
previous "broken state"?  Just because we have ONE user who insists on it?