Subject: bug#75834: [PATCH] Add missing custom :set to savehist-autosave-interval

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 01 Feb 2025 15:57:46 +0200

> From: Ship Mints <[email-masked]>
> Date: Sat, 1 Feb 2025 08:35:09 -0500
> Cc: [email-masked]
> 
> On Sat, Feb 1, 2025 at 8:28 AM Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
>  A disadvantage of idle timers is that they can miss changes.  This
>  might be more significant for the save-place case, since by the time
>  Emacs is idle, the file you visited might no longer be visited in any
>  buffer.
> 
> Changes to the save-place-alist in memory are not lost unless there is an Emacs crash or an abnormal
> Emacs shutdown. Same for savehist-minibuffer-history-variables which are accumulated in memory until
> persisted.

But saving with a timer _is_ for the case of abnormal shutdown or
crash, isn't it?  Because otherwise we could just save at exit, right?

So if you are using an idle timer of 5 min, and is Emacs never idle
for 5 min before it crashes, the data will be lost.

> It's the interval to persist the save-place-alist that we're talking about. I think using an idle timer in both
> saveplace and savehist will not cause a real-world issue. If people are truly concerned about persisting they
> should set a very short timer and idleness occurs frequently, in practice.

It's not just any idleness, it's 5 min of idleness.