customize-set-variable just about everywhere, or leave some setqs alone?

[jf]

I previously asked about the rationale for recommending and preferring customize-set-variable over setq. It makes sense, but I'm just noticing as I look through code that I see some setqs already that could possibly be changed. My question is: should this preference be universal for all customizable variables? or are there situations when it's ok to just use setq?

For example, I see in https://github.com/SystemCrafters/crafted-emacs/blob/master/examples/straight-el/early-init.el a bunch of setqs (and no customize-set-variables) for these variables. The first one is customizable; I'm not sure about the rest (I'm not able at this point in time to grok the crafted-emacs code to determine if customize-set-variable is really necessary for crafted-package-*):

• package-enable-at-startup
• crafted-package-system
• crafted-package-installer
• crafted-package-installed-predicate

[jf]

Just to add one more example: custom-file is a customizable variable as well, but the Getting Started Guide uses setq to set its value (see https://github.com/SystemCrafters/crafted-emacs/blob/master/docs/getting-started-guide.org#emacs-initialization)

[jvdydev]

Just looked at it, seems like package-enable-at-startup should, in fact, be using customize-set-variable (as it's declared defcustom in package.el).

As for the crafted-package-*, both installer and installed-predicate are declared via defvar, therefor should be set with setq.

The crafted-package-system is (I think) a leftover from either crafted-emacs v1 or an older version of the package-config which would bootstrap alternative package managers (tl;dr: it should be removed from the examples as it's not declared at all).

While the general goal is to use customize-set-variable with defcustom and setq with defvar, I think we have some code which doesn't conform to this rule yet, thank you for pointing them out 😄

[sthesing]

You beat me to it, @jvdydev 😄

[jf]

thank you for looking into the details! so to clarify: you're also saying that setq withOUT a defvar first does not work? It's not immediately obvious from the help for setq.

[jvdydev]

Oh sorry, I phrased that poorly.
setq without defvar does set the variable, it also declares it if not previously declared.
However, it is usually considered to be "bad style" to not declare variables using either defvar or defcustom.
The variable I was referring to (crafted-package-system) seems to be completely unused in the crafted-emacs code-base (including not being declared), hence I was suggesting to remove it from the examples.

Hope that makes sense 😄

[sthesing]

I think I'm oversimplifying this a bit, but essentially

• customize-set-variable is to set variables defined by defcustom,
• setq is to set variables defined by defvar.

We could certainly look over our use of customization variables and streamline this a bit. It is inconsistent at places.