Hi
thanks for your responses.
Mine is "code in the wild"... and it uses conventions that predate the "suggestions" made in more recent versions of the Emacs documentation.
Bottom line, the GNU coding standards requiring - rightly so - 80 columns, conflict with the requirements on the first line.
Put simply, you cannot have the
;;; foo.el -- This file is a baz with a long description, even if this example is not
With the requirement of having buffer local variables (forget about lexical-binding!) in the first line.
One of the two has to yield. Given "older" conventions and "code in the wild", the first line (or lines!!!) should be reserved for buffer local variables (and even the Mode: Emacs-Lisp declaration). The "file content" documentation can come afterward.
This is just a convention (*,**) in the Emacs documentation, and possibly only one package (AFAIK, checkdoc) will be affected.
All the best
Marco
(*) Well, the buffer local variables and the Mode: declaration could appear in the first lines, as I recall, if my memory does not fail me.
(**) Since we are at it, old Lisp geezers like me use ;;;;, ;;; at the top level, and ;; and ; for "in code" comments; where the ;;; and ;; conventions for Emacs-Lisp came from, who knows.