A note about Antinews

A note about Antinews

[Richard M Stallman]

Since the purpose of Antinews is to help people use the previous Emacs
version, there is usually no need to mention features that are simply
absent in that version.  That situation will be clear enough to users
without help from the manual.

For instance, this

    @item
    Emacs can no longer be started as a daemon.  We decided that having an
    Emacs sitting silently in the background with no visual manifestation
    anywhere in sight is too confusing.

may not need mentioning, because --daemon will give an error message
saying it's not implemented, and other cases aren't affected.


The kind of change for which the user really needs help from Antinews
is where a feature works _differently_ in the previous version.
In those cases, the user might have trouble figuring out how to use
the old version without some sort of help.

Re: A note about Antinews

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Richard M Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
> Date: Sat, 29 Nov 2008 04:17:25 -0500
> 
> Since the purpose of Antinews is to help people use the previous Emacs
> version, there is usually no need to mention features that are simply
> absent in that version.  That situation will be clear enough to users
> without help from the manual.
> 
> For instance, this
> 
>     @item
>     Emacs can no longer be started as a daemon.  We decided that having an
>     Emacs sitting silently in the background with no visual manifestation
>     anywhere in sight is too confusing.
> 
> may not need mentioning, because --daemon will give an error message
> saying it's not implemented, and other cases aren't affected.

I didn't add this item, just the second sentence.  But looking through
anti.texi in previous releases (21.4 and 22.3), I see quite a few
entries about features that ``were removed'' or ``no longer exist''.

I agree that, in general, ``missing'' features need less attention
that those that behave differently, but I wouldn't say we shouldn't
mention the former ones at all.

Re: A note about Antinews

[Sam Steingold]

> * Richard M Stallman <ezf@tah.bet> [2008-11-29 04:17:25 -0500]:
>
> Since the purpose of Antinews is to help people use the previous Emacs
> version, there is usually no need to mention features that are simply
> absent in that version.  That situation will be clear enough to users
> without help from the manual.
>
> For instance, this
>
>     @item
>     Emacs can no longer be started as a daemon.  We decided that having an
>     Emacs sitting silently in the background with no visual manifestation
>     anywhere in sight is too confusing.
>
> may not need mentioning, because --daemon will give an error message
> saying it's not implemented, and other cases aren't affected.

ISTR that when Mule was added to Emacs, it was mentioned in Antinews as
"Emacs no longer is hubbled by the i18n complexity, being limited to
8-bit characters".

-- 
Sam Steingold (http://sds.podval.org/) on Ubuntu 8.10 (intrepid)
http://israelunderattack.slide.com http://memri.org http://mideasttruth.com
http://camera.org http://dhimmi.com http://palestinefacts.org http://ffii.org
Good programmers treat Microsoft products as damage and route around it.