Subject: bug#13915: 24.3.50; `font-lock-syntactic-keywords' - really obsolete?

From: "Drew Adams" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 10 Mar 2013 20:47:22 -0700

> > If the very file that declares it obsolete cannot be 
> > updated to reflect that, why tell users they should
> > consider it obsolete?
>  
> Hi Drew!  How's life on your side of the world?
> Oh, and by the way, what would you say if we removed support for
> font-lock-syntactic-keywords without first marking it obsolete?
> 
> Hmm... thought so,

No one suggested that you should remove support for it before marking it
obsolete!  You are right to suppose that I would never have suggested such a
thing.  So why bring it up as a straw man?

But perhaps it says something that that was your only reaction to the bug
report, though that was not at all what the report was about.  What do you
think?

1. NEWS does not make clear how to change code that currently uses
`font-lock-syntactic-keywords'.

2. `font-lock.el' does not make that clear either, as it has itself apparently
not been so converted.

I made clear that some of the occurrences in `font-lock.el' obviously provide
ongoing support for it.  But only a few of them, would be my guess.  Am I wrong
about that?

3. You closed the bug.  `font-lock-syntactic-keywords' was marked obsolete in
24.1.  24.3 has now been released.

4. But the 24.3 NEWS is no clearer about this.  Both the 24.3 Elisp manual and
the 24.3  font-lock.el Commentary and doc strings still speak mainly of
`font-lock-syntactic-keywords' (`syntax-propertize-function' is barely present
in font-lock.el).  As before.

Users are not helped any more than before wrt converting code that uses
`font-lock-syntactic-keywords'.

That's what this bug report is about.