RE: [PATCH] left-fringe for speedbar

[Drew Adams]

    Previously the speedbar did have a left fringe.  I don't know why it was
    removed because there's no ChangeLog entry.

I don't know why any change was made.

The behavior should not override a user's setting - that's my only concern.

I express the concern because I know that at one point merely loading
fringe.el (which happened just by clicking a navigational button in
Customize!) overrode user settings in `default-frame-alist'. That bug was
fixed, but I would not want to see other libraries (e.g. speedbar) put back
the fringe a user might have tried to prevent.

And it seems that there are some lingering problems with the fringe-mode
mechanism to keep in mind. From Richard's email of 2004-10-17:

      I made a fix that prevents loading of fringe.el from overriding
      any explicit settings of fringe properties in default-frame-alist.
      Instead detects that the properties have been specified there,
      and updates the value of fringe-mode to match them.

      This is not totally clean.  fringe-mode really ought, I think,
      to apply only to frames in which nothing else has been done
      to individually set their properties.  However, there is no
      existing mechanism which is natural for that, and I don't
      think this is worth the trouble to implement one.

      If other such problems are encountered, a variant of this approach
      should do the job.

    Perhaps you can say what
    the advantage is (apart from saving one character width which would be
    an argument against the fringe, in general, not just for the speedbar.

I have no argument to change the default setting - for the speedbar or in
general. I just want to be able, as a user, to set it as I please (in my
case, turn off fringe).