donkey 1.12.0 — a program's buffer keeps its own keys, and DONKEY keeps four'ish

1.11.0 answered "NORMAL state owns the alphabet in a buffer a program
made" by stepping aside altogether: Dired, Ibuffer, Magit and the
tabulated lists went on donkey-excluded-modes, which gave the mode
its keys back and took h j k l with them. This release is the middle
that was missing, and it comes in two sizes. In a list or a viewer —
Dired, Ibuffer, Occur, the menus, twenty-one modes in all — DONKEY
holds five keys, h j k l and SPC, and the mode keeps its
whole alphabet. In the eighteen that are text to read — help, Man,
apropos, compilation — it holds about two dozen, because there is
nothing in those buffers to lose. The modeline says DONKEY[S] in
both, and thirty-nine modes ship a section.

Changed — you will notice these

• j and k walk the listing and l opens what is under the cursor
  in Dired, Ibuffer and the tabulated lists. They came off
  donkey-excluded-modes and are support modes instead, so d, m,
  x, g and the rest of the mode's alphabet are exactly as they were
  in 1.11.0, and the four motion keys work again. h goes up a
  directory in Dired.
• d no longer deletes in help-mode, Man-mode, occur-mode,
  compilation-mode, grep-mode and org-agenda-mode, and neither do
  the other editing letters. NORMAL state used to be on in those, which
  meant DONKEY owned the alphabet; they are support modes now. Nothing
  was at risk — the buffers are read-only, so every editing key was
  refused — but the mode's own keys were unreachable, and now they are
  not.
• SPC is the leader in a support mode as well as in NORMAL state, and
  it is the same keymap. Anything you have hung under SPC reaches
  Dired, help, Man and the rest without being named a second time. The
  mode's own SPC, usually scroll-up-command, is C-v as it always
  was, and S-SPC is untouched.
• g is a prefix in the eighteen modes that take the reading keys —
  Man-mode, help-mode, apropos-mode, compilation-mode and the
  rest — because g g and g e go there. Where g was
  revert-buffer or recompile the section carries it on R.
• w, b, y, G, the mark run and ? work in those eighteen —
  about two dozen keys in all, against five in the other twenty-one.
  They are buffers of text to read and copy, so the reading half of
  NORMAL state is there and nothing that types is. C-g still quits:
  it delegates to keyboard-quit wherever NORMAL state is off.
• l goes to the error in a compilation buffer, into the entry in an
  archive or a tar file, to the occurrence in an Occur buffer, and to
  the reference in an Xref buffer. Twenty-four of the thirty-nine
  sections give h or l a meaning; where none does they are
  backward-char and forward-char.

Added

• donkey-support-modes, the table of sections. A section names the
  mode, optionally a package, and the (CHARACTER . COMMAND) pairs
  that say what a key means there. A mode matches by derivation as well
  as by name, and the first section it matches answers, so write a
  specific mode before the general one it derives from.
• donkey-support-mode-exceptions, for a buffer that looks like a
  program's but is one you type in. occur-edit-mode is the case it
  ships for.
• donkey-key-packages, a named list of sequences a section can ask
  for in one word. prose is the only one that ships: the reading half
  of NORMAL state, forty-five sequences.

Under the hood

• The rule that handed individual letters back to a major mode was
  built, measured and then deleted. Every buffer it would have applied
  to is a support mode, decided by its section, so it found nothing;
  the options it introduced never appeared in a release.
• Options read from post-command-hook are coerced rather than
  trusted, a section cannot name a command that types, and the two
  caches that decide a buffer's state are keyed on the same inputs.
• 1,475 tests, up from 1,426.

Upgrading

Nothing to do. If you put dired-mode, ibuffer-mode or
tabulated-list-mode on donkey-excluded-modes yourself, your setting
still wins and those buffers stay DONKEY[E]; remove them to get the
four motion keys back. Info-mode is still excluded, as it was in
1.11.0.