Re: format use inquiry

[Jean-Christophe Helary <jean.christophe.helary@gmail.com>]

> On Jun 22, 2017, at 10:57, Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> wrote:
> 
>>> (format "http%s://elpa.gnu.org/packages/"
>>>                                        (if (gnutls-available-p) "s" ""))
> 
>> Yes, it is. But obviously I think that, since I wrote it.
> 
> I agree it is acceptable, but this looks like something that might be
> needed in a number of places, so perhaps we should make a nicer
> interface to do it.

There is only one instance of such a query in package.el and no other package in the emacs distribution seems to use gnutls-available-p to add an "s" to http.

Paul suggested that it would be a maintenance hassle to keep 2 almost identical urls if we spelled them out as Yuri suggested but I checked other source packages and for ex auth-source-pass-tests.el explicitly spells out all the urls without resorting to smart formatting to save a few characters.

Also, considering the way %s is abused in other places package.el, for ex in:

 (message "%d package%s marked for upgrading."                                                               
        (length upgrades)                                                                                          
        (if (= (length upgrades) 1) "" "s"))))) 

I don't think it is good to keep the above code because it gives bad incentives to authors especially if work on i18n/l10n proceeds (even though http/https is not related to l10n).

So, I'm going to spell out the urls as I proceed with untangling code and translatable strings in package.el. I'll send a diff here when I'm done for evaluation.

Jean-Christophe