Re: [Emacs-diffs] emacs-25 f8208b6: Document the user-level features of the Xref package

[Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru>]

On 01/22/2016 10:40 AM, Stephen Leake wrote:

> The doc string says:
>
>      Find all meaningful symbols that match PATTERN.
>      The argument has the same meaning as in ‘apropos’.
>
> I read that as "all occurances of the regexp"; I don't know what
> "meaningful" is supposed to mean here.

Symbol that are "meaningful" in the current runtime. Functions, 
variables, etc.

> If it is supposed to find only definitions, the doc string should say
> so:
>
>      Find the definitions of all symbols that match PATTERN.
>      PATTERN has the same meaning as in `apropos'.

Feel free to change the docstring to this. However, "find the symbols" 
semantics might be preferable, since we might want to show some 
additional info there, not just locations of their definitions.

Just like M-x apropos does.

> However, the etags implementation uses re-search-forward to find PATTERN
> in the tags files; that won't handle word lists as `apropos' does. So
> does that need to be fixed, or should we change the doc string further
> to say:
>
>      Find the definitions of all symbols that match PATTERN (a regexp).

No. xref-find-apropos converts from PATTERN to a regexp itself. Just 
like `apropos'.