Configuration files vs customization

[Dr Rainer Woitok]

Greetings,

in the course  of my transition  from XEmacs  to Emacs  I meanwhile have
reached the point  of getting Vm running under Emacs.   But my first at-
tempt utterly failed.   After some  experimenting  and checking variable
values with "C-h v" I came to the conclusion that at least in some vari-
ables' descriptions  the remark "You can customize this variable" really
meant "You HAVE TO customize this variable".

So eventually I removed  everything customizable  from my ".vm" configu-
ration file and customized it instead.  And then Vm worked as expected.

Why is that?   Do I have to use "defvar" rather than "setq" in my ".vm"
configuration file to mark these variables as dynamically bound?

Personally, I hate this clicky-clicky customization interface because it
doesn't evaluate the values, even though function "custom-set-variables"
provides an option to do so.   Thus you can't  use things like  '(getenv
"HOME")', '(getenv "HOST")' or '(cond ...)'.   The lack of this flexibi-
lity makes configuration rather tricky.  And according to the comment

   ;; Your init file should contain only one such instance.
   ;; If there is more than one, they won't work right.

function "custom-set-variables" writes into my "custom.el" file, putting
a call to "custom-set-variables"  together with the Vm specific customi-
zation directly into configuration file ".vm" is not expected to work.

So being forced to put more or less  all application specific configura-
tion into one big "custom.el" file which on top of all  does only accept
constants as values is quite a nuisance for me.   Originally, having se-
parate configuration files  like ".vm" or ".gnus.el" had the purpose not
to clutter one's  "init.el" file  and to save time  when firing up Emacs
without also starting Vm or Gnus.

How do others solve these configuration problems?

Sincerely,
  Rainer