Re: Turning on savehist-mode by default

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Sun, 17 Dec 2023 05:19:31 -0600
> Cc: luangruo@yahoo.com, emacs-devel@gnu.org, sbaugh@catern.com,
>  stefankangas@gmail.com
> From: Adam Porter <adam@alphapapa.net>
> 
> On 12/17/23 02:12, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > 
> > That mentions a single 3rd-party package that triggers the issue, and
> > includes a workaround solution.  I see nothing awful there.
> 
>  From my perspective, as the developer of the package being accused of 
> having performance problems by random users, problems I couldn't 
> reproduce, nor even begin to guess what the cause was, or if it was even 
> an actual problem, it felt pretty awful.

Welcome to the club.  I (and other maintainers) get that feeling
almost every day.  And yet I don't conclude from this that existing
features are badly implemented or that they should be removed or
turned off by default.  Instead, we investigate the issues, find the
problems, and either fix them or provide a workaround.

So I see nothing special in the incident you referred to: it's what I
see every day.

> >> I'd guess that there are more such cases in the wild waiting to be
> >> triggered.
> > 
> > You know about other packages that add huge elements to history
> > variables?  Which ones?
> 
> My package does not add huge elements to history variables.  It simply 
> passes arguments to functions via their interactive forms.  I didn't 
> even know that such history variables existed until that bug report came 
> to its conclusion, and I've used Emacs for years and published tens of 
> packages which together have nearly a million downloads.  So if it can 
> happen to me, it can probably happen to anyone.

That was not my question, sorry.  My question was whether you are
actually _aware_ of such problems happening in other cases with other
packages.  Because if not, a single instance is not yet a reason for
considering this a grave problem, a reason serious enough to consider
savehist flawed or immature.