Re: NEWS worthy?

[Thien-Thi Nguyen <ttn@glug.org>]

   From: Karl Eichwalder <keichwa@gmx.net>
   Date: Sat, 08 Mar 2003 07:01:43 +0100

   I don't know what dcl mode stands for.

DIGITAL (RIP) command language, standard scripting offering under vms.
personal [gt]ripe: at one point i considered myself a budding dcl hacker, 
but then a kind soul (at DEC no less) turned me onto emacs, after which 
dcl lost its charm due to lack of dcl support in emacs (at the time).
even now, i see the global string font-locking mechanism mishandles
dcl's peculiar (IMHO) quoting conventions; dcl syntax is both over-
and under-permissive in all the wrong places....

   >    There is no need to put this in NEWS, because users will
   >    get the benefit of it without having to know about it.

   Not necessarily.  Maybe, the user has written himself a .dcl mode which
   is rather limited.  Such a user most probably is interested in the NEWS
   of an official dcl mode -- but he will never see it, because he
   something as follows in .emacs (like me):

   (setq auto-mode-alist
	 (append
	  (list
	   '("\\.dcl$" . dtd-mode)
	   '("\\.mod$" . dtd-mode))
	  auto-mode-alist))

the change in question is a minor improvement on the extant dcl-mode,
and so the associated NEWS (had it been worthy) would report this.
reporting existince of dcl-mode happened already w/ emacs 20.1 release.
if a user doesn't read the NEWS that cannot be helped, generally.

thi