In retrospect, I agree with you all. I'm sorry I have not thought things through before posting.
In any case, the comment in CVS dired.el, L733 is misleading.
On another unrelated note, kudos to those who changed the default behavior of C-n C-p in case where one logical line is displayed on multiple visual lines. This has bugged me for some time now, and I think the default behavior is much more sensible now.
( I still think the default behavior for scrolling is insane, though, but I guess there are reasons to that, and I don't want to start a troll :) )
Keep up the great work !
2008/9/2 Richard M. Stallman
<address@hidden>
> In general, prompting the user for optional information is a bad idea,
> and this is especially true for "asynchronous" events.
I agree, but it's also true that we do exactly that for plain files,
which is a much more common case, so this same argument would call for
a similar change to plain files.
Plain files are less likely to change while you have them visited.
If they do, continuing to edit the old contents is probably a grave mistake.
Precisely because this is a rather grave occurrence,
it would be a mistake to revert without telling the user.
Asking the user the question of whether to revert is an ideal
way to inform the user of the anomaly.
Directories often change while you have them in Dired, and that is not
an anomaly. Continuing to operate on the Dired buffer is probably ok.
Reverting it automatically would be ok, but it is too slow.
I think the message now used is just the right behavior.