intern-soft, find-face/get-face, and facep for determining faces' definedness

[Brian Palmer]

In vc.el, vc-annotate-lines, the following binding is established:
(face (or (intern-soft face-name)
          (let ((tmp-face (make-face (intern face-name))))
            (set-face-foreground tmp-face (cdr color))
            (if vc-annotate-background
                (set-face-background tmp-face
                                     vc-annotate-background))
            tmp-face))); Return the face

This is true in both emacs and the recently-synced xemacs vc.el (a
similar issue was present in the older xemacs code). This seems
frankly wrong to me; it doesn't matter whether the symbol has been
interned, it matters whether the face has been defined. A fix would be
in emacs to use (facep face-name) and in xemacs to use (find-face
face-name), instead.

The two different approaches seems troublesome to me; it'd be nice if
the same functions could be used in both . Xemacs developers, is there
any reason that xemacs's facep should not be extended to take either
face objects or names (so, for example, (facep 'bold) => t )? Or 
could find-face/get-face be implemented for emacs? (They seem like
probably useful functions to me). It seems like it'd be as simple as

(if (facep FACE) 
    (make-face FACE) 
  (cerror 'nonexistent-face (format "Face %s doesn't exist" FACE)))

Or, both. Thoughts appreciated.

-- 
I'm awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard.