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

From: "Drew Adams" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 11 Mar 2013 14:04:58 -0700

> > 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?
> 
> Because the "uses" you seem to see in font-lock.el are just the code
> that *implements* font-lock-syntactic-keywords.  None of it *uses* it.
> So removing those "uses" would remove support for it.

I would humbly suggest that most of the occurrences (I did not refer to the
occurrences as "*uses*", so your quotes are inaccurate here) are vestigial, in
doc strings.  They do not *implement* `font-lock-syntactic-keywords'.

And I was clear that any occurrences that remain to *implement* the old should
of course remain.

Since a preferred replacement has already been implemented, that (the new, not
the old) is what should be mentioned, above all, in the doc strings.  That is
not the case.  That is the point about `font-lock.el' occurrences.

But the *important* point is what the bug report is really about:

>> 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.

If you update the NEWS & the manual & the doc strings, and leave the code as is
to support both old and new, then the bug will be fixed.

The NEWS, in particular, should tell users how to replace the old with the new.
It is no help wrt that, so far.  It is clearly not as simple as substituting one
(a function) for the other (a variable).

It's about helping users.  If I did not find this unclear myself I would not
have taken the time to file the bug (and reply to your (so far) sarcastic and
unhelpful replies).