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I recently encountered a situation in which specifying a :set function for a defcustom raised a Symbol's function definition is void error.

This is because the :set function relies on another function in the same package, which is not yet loaded when the defcustom is initialized.

The way I handled this is to explicitly define the :initialize function to be custom-initialize-default. Is this the best way? If I wanted to use the :set function for initialization, how best to do that[1]?

[1]: Elisp does not have forward declaration AFAIK; declare-function doesn't seem to work for functions in the same file

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Yes, if the :set function is not appropriate also for initialization, explicitly provide a different :initialize function. Using custom-initialize-default is a common use case for this.

If you really do not want to do that, but you want to use just :set, then your :set function will need to do the necessary initialization, either conditionally or systematically. You might have a use case for this, but it would likely be unusual. It is by design that initialization stuff is separated from the rest, by making :initialize available.

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