RE: Q on minibuffer-message

[Drew Adams]

    Drew> I could change the definition of command `foo', to pass it a
          flag to not call `minibuffer-message' (or to call it only when the
          command is called interactively), but I'd rather not have to
          resort to that.

  Eli> This doesn't explain why you wanted to avoid such a solution.

In fact, I have always planned anyway to modify `foo' in this way, because
my library needs to work also with Emacs 20, which has no
`minibuffer-message-timeout'. When I said that I wished to avoid such
modification, what I meant was that one should be able to avoid it.

  Ian> But why?  The argument can be optional, meaning if it's not
       given it will default to nil.  So there's no need to modify call
       sites in programs.

The concern was not needing to modify functions that call `foo'. The concern
was needing to modify `foo', the function that calls `minibuffer-message'.

The point is that it would be useful to be able to inhibit the action of
`minibuffer-message' from _without_, just as you can turn off logging of
messages in buffer *Messages* from without.

Imagine a scenario where you have no control over the definition of `foo'.
You simply want to use it, but not hear its `minibuffer-message' noise.
Binding `minibuffer-message-timeout' to 0 (or nil, or t, or whatever) should
let you do that. That's all.