Subject: bug#7771: 23.1; can't turn off font-lock-mode globally

From: "K. Richard Pixley" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 03 Jan 2011 12:29:13 -0800

On 20110103 11:52, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> From: "K. Richard Pixley"<[email-masked]>
>> Date: Mon, 03 Jan 2011 10:40:19 -0800
>>
>> I believe that the fix needs to occur at a meta level to font lock.
> What do you mean by "meta level to font lock"?
I mean that the mechanism for allowing or barring font lock apparently 
can't be part of the font lock subsystem.  It appears as though it will 
need to be outside the font-lock system in order to _gate_ the font lock 
system.

It appears as though people may be erroneously conflating font-lock 
modes with syntactic meaning of the underlying text and keying off 
font-lock values rather than the syntactic meanings.  This leads to the 
erroneous programmer impression that font-lock is a necessary 
prerequisite for their code, so they force it on.

Perhaps this is just an iteration of the "better lock, better lockpick, 
better lock, better lockpick" escalation cycle.  Perhaps there's another 
way to solve this problem without resorting to an escalation.  But as 
emacs is currently regressing, (can't use major modes that used to be 
available), it appears as though we are in dire need of a quick fix 
before emacs regresses to a point of complete inutility.

Either that, or we need to back off some recent changes and return to 
the code that worked.

--rich