bug#31656: 26.1; `fill-paragraph' malformats in emacs-lisp-mode

[Stefan Guath <stefan@automata.se>]

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I agree that overriding the value of `fill-column' _only_ inside doc
strings is the sensible way to go. The only reason
`emacs-lisp-docstring-fill-column' exists in the first place is to cover
the edge case of doc strings as recommended in
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Documentation-Tips.html
(e.g. for apropos) which is fine, but overriding it in any other situation
is confusing. We already have a general mechanism for controlling the fill
column width on a major-mode basis through hooks and `fill-column' being
buffer-local, and should as a rule encourage the use of these consistent
control mechanisms across all major-modes - not introduce redundant
functionalities that fight each other.

The proposed solution in this email thread by Noam Postavsky is already too
greedy in that it affects _all_ strings, not only doc strings (or maybe I
misunderstood "(nth 3 (syntax-ppss))" ?). Still, it's better than the
current behavior, and I guess that identifying doc strings only (and not
strings in general) is too difficult.

On Sat, Jun 2, 2018 at 4:09 PM Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:

> > From: Noam Postavsky <npostavs@gmail.com>
> > Cc: 31656@debbugs.gnu.org,  stefan@automata.se
> > Date: Sat, 02 Jun 2018 09:07:10 -0400
> >
> > Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> >
> > > Are there no use cases where we would want M-q outside of syntactic
> > > strings?
> >
> > Okay, I can think of one possibility: if you've pasted a long single
> > line consisting of a quoted list of symbols, then M-q could be a
> > convenient way of breaking it up into multiple lines.  With M-q disabled
> > in Lisp code, you would need to copy the data to a temp non-lisp-mode
> > buffer in order to do that, so a bit more inconvenient.
>
> Then maybe just override the value of fill-column when inside strings?
>

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