Re: face for non-ASCII characters

[Chong Yidong]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:

>     After that I changed it so the user can review and decide at each
>     opportunistic install.
>
> This is not a binary question, it's a scale.  You want to take a step
> towards the wrong end of the scale.  We are just introducing the
> separate package archive, which is a big step.  Now is too soon to
> consider another step.  The risk here is hard to calculate, so we must
> be cautious.

For what it's worth, I don't think general-case opportunistic
installation is a good idea, even from a strictly technical standpoint.

One can imagine special instances where one might wish to prompt the
user, at a very specific point during the execution of a command, to
install a package.  In fact, this can be done easily using the existing
package.el infrastructure (or even without package.el; this is Lisp,
after all).

But such program behavior should not be encouraged in general.  In the
vast majority of forseeable Emacs-relevant situations, opportunistic
installation is a false optimization.  It introduces more moving parts
into a program and obnoxiously makes the user wait for a download in the
middle of a command---all for the purpose of saving trivial amounts of
disk space.  In practically all instances, package dependencies are the
proper way to go.

So the functionality that Lennart is promoting is not something that I'm
interested in at all.