Re: On the new startup and scratch buffer

[Chong Yidong]

Juri Linkov <address@hidden> writes:

>>>>> If people are interested in a change to this behavior (always add text
>>>>> to *scratch* if initial-scratch-message isn't nil), I'll supply a patch.
>
> Installed on the trunk and the Emacs 22 branch.

I'm not convinced that this change should go into Emacs 22.  The
reason is a little subtle.

If you check the changelogs, inhibit-startup-screen used to be called
inhibit-startup-message, and i-s-m is now an alias for i-s-s.

With this change, people who've been using Emacs for a while and have
inhibit-startup-message bound to nil in their init file (as I did)
will encounter unexpected behavior.  In other words, even though
inhibit-startup-message is non-nil, there's a startup message!

It's scarcely a serious issue---after all, Emacs progresses, and the
meanings of variables change.  All the same, this kind of
incompatibility is best introduced between major versions.