Simplification of faces

[Richard Stallman]

I am thinking of essentially eliminating the face attributes as a way
to control what a face looks like.  Programs would use only `defface'
and `face-spec-set'.

In addition, a spec given in `face-spec-set' would totally replace
whatever spec was previously given for the same face using the
`defface' or `face-spec-set'.  Thus, the appearance information for a
face would consist of a single Lisp datum, plus X resources.
(Inheritance from other faces would still occur.)

I've checked all the uses of `face-spec-set' outside of custom and
faces.el.  It seems they would not need to be changed.

However, this would require rewriting the code that calls
`set-face-attribute' and the older functions such as
`set-face-foreground' that set single attributes.  There are only
about 8 packages in Emacs which do so, so it would not be a big job.
However, there may be some other programs that users use which still
rely on this feature.

What do people think?