Re: Function to retrieve package version

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

On May 22, 2019 5:02:20 AM GMT+03:00, "Paul W. Rankin" <hello@paulwrankin.com> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, May 22 2019, Richard Stallman wrote:
> > Please don't do that.  The manual is very long already.  That 
> > makes
> > printing expensive.  Before we add a new topic, we need to 
> > consider
> > whether the benefit is worth the increase in cost.
> 
> Can you elaborate on what you mean here Richard? Do you mean 
> people printing the Elisp manual themselves, or does the FSF print 
> copies of the Elisp manual gratis?
> 
> If the former, surely the benefit of Emacs Lisp package 
> maintainers knowing about the built-in "utility functions for 
> Emacs Lisp maintainers" outweighs the miniscule additional cost of 
> a couple of paragraphs that might add a single page to the printed 
> output, which at the very most (barring some sort of OCD 
> condition) will be printed once per major release?
> 
> And if I'm going to the trouble/expense of printing the entire 
> Elisp manual, I damn sure want it to be as complete as possible, 
> rather than later discover it's missing key topics and so will 
> require a reprint. The idea that I'm being miserly about my stock 
> of printer paper in this scenario is a little unrealistic...

Richard means the manual whjch the FSF prints and sells.  If it's too large, it will be more expensive.

But there's a way to have that cake and eat it, too: we can have certain portions of the manual conditioned by @ifnottex.  We already do that for some less important topics.  So there's no need to argue about this particular case.