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From: "Drew Adams" <drew.adams@oracle.com>
To: "'Eli Zaretskii'" <eliz@gnu.org>, "'Glenn Morris'" <rgm@gnu.org>
Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
Subject: RE: Remove * characters from the front of variable docstrings
Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2012 13:43:53 -0700	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <8CA396E6D69242EF87F96F0A01695DA3@us.oracle.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <838vhii72w.fsf@gnu.org>

> > I was glad to see the "*" chars finally disappearing in 
> > trunk r107813.

Why?  Who were those `*' chars hurting?

> I wasn't, FWIW.  Suddenly "M-x set-variable" doesn't work with
> variables I was used to since about forever.

I agree with Eli.  I pointed out the problem prior to the change:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2012-02/msg00419.html

Others in the thread also disagreed with this change.  Here's a XEmacs
perspective:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2012-02/msg00455.html

Note that that thread _started_ with the innocuous _question_ of which Emacs
versions require `*' here.  Some 3rd-party Emacs code tries to maintain
compatibility with older Emacs versions.  So it still uses `*' in defcustoms,
which is perfectly normal.

But now you have introduced the bug (still not fixed or even responded to) that
for such definitions the `*' shows up _as part of the help text_ when you use
`C-h v':
http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=10475

Yet the fix for that bug is trivial, as the bug report mentions:
(when (eq ?* (elt doc 0)) (setq doc  (substring doc 1)))

On n'arrete pas le progres...  Aren't there more important things to work on
than introducing such bugs and additional hurdles for 3rd-party code?




  reply	other threads:[~2012-04-26 20:43 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 11+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2012-04-26 18:08 Remove * characters from the front of variable docstrings Glenn Morris
2012-04-26 18:46 ` Glenn Morris
2012-04-26 18:51   ` Glenn Morris
2012-04-26 19:55     ` Tassilo Horn
2012-04-26 20:48       ` Bastien
2012-04-26 20:51     ` Bastien
2012-04-26 20:14 ` Eli Zaretskii
2012-04-26 20:43   ` Drew Adams [this message]
2012-04-26 20:54   ` Glenn Morris
2012-04-26 21:01 ` Stefan Monnier
  -- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2016-09-23 10:32 Tino Calancha

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