Re: quit-window

[Richard Stallman]

"Quitting" a window just means returning to a different window or
buffer configuration, after a change that is thought of as temporary.
As far as buffers are concerned, it is no different from any other
change in selection.  That's not supposed to change anything about
any buffer.

Thus, if a mode tries to do something nontrivial to the buffer on the
occasion of quitting, that makes me worry.  Should that be done at
all?

    I have identified at least 18 modes that do something similar. Maybe
    some special case even needs to, but most of the time it could be
    cleaned up, IMO.

I think we need to study carefully what things they do, and whether there
is a good reason for them.

I looked at Info-exit and it seems ok, because it is only doing
something special in the case of stand-alone Info.

(Is stand-alone Info obsolete?  We have a separate program, in C, to
do that.)

Maybe others are similarly superfluous and can be replaced with
quit-window.

Maybe others do things that aren't necessary, creating inconsistency
we would be better off without.

Maybe some others do special things for good reason -- if so, what are
those things?  Would some narrow and specific features be good
solutions for them?

We don't want to install these changes now, but there's no need to
delay the studying.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
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