Re: Questioning the new behavior of `open-line'.

[Karl Fogel]

David Kastrup <address@hidden> writes:
>Emacs will never be perfect in all respects, not least of all because
>some indentations are motivated by aesthetic criteria and by judgment
>calls on different criteria than Emacs uses.  To intentionally make it
>annoying to work around bad decisions in order to make developers change
>Emacs is just stupid because the fallout will hit first and foremost the
>users rather than the developers even if we hypothesize that for every
>code there is exactly one correct and desirable and machine-determinable
>way to indent it.

As a statement of general principle, that's certainly reasonable.

But in this situation, I don't think we face that particular tradeoff (and 
therefore Artur's proposed course of action makes the most sense).

There is consensus that in column zero, C-o should do what it used to do (i.e., 
no electric indent).  I think there's also consensus that in column >0, most of 
the time it makes sense for C-o to do electric indent even though there are 
sometimes cases where someone might want it to do no indentation.

There has been one example of a mode where from column >0, the indentation 
itself is broken, so that after doing C-o one would have to go down to the 
mis-indented line to fix it -- but that would be just as true if there had been 
*no* indentation (IOW, with C-o from column >0, doing no indentation is not 
more or less broken than any other mis-indentation, and costs about the same 
for the user to fix afterwards).

It's true that developers are more likely to fix that mode's indentation if the 
problem is less hidden from them, and in this case there isn't any compelling 
win for users if we mask the problem by making C-o completely 
indentation-insensitive, because for most users most of the time, "no 
indentation" would be just as broken a behavior as "indentation to the wrong 
place" (when doing C-o from column >0).

Best regards,
-Karl