Subject: bug#23425: master branch: `message' wrongly corrupts ' to curly quote.

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 10 Jun 2017 16:39:33 +0300

> Date: Sat, 10 Jun 2017 13:01:01 +0000
> From: Alan Mackenzie <[email-masked]>
> Cc: Paul Eggert <[email-masked]>, [email-masked]
> 
> > https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnu-emacs/2016-05/msg00324.html
> 
> > What more do you want?
> 
> An apology and an undertaking not to repeat the offense.

It wasn't an offense.  It was a good-faith mistake.  Please accept
what the others think about this, and please don't blow this out of
proportion.

> But, to repeat myself, I'm most unhappy that it was slipped into Emacs
> bypassing the customary discussion process.

Veteran contributors -- and Paul is definitely among them -- aren't
required to wait for a discussion before they push their commits.
When to start a discussion before making a change is up to their
judgment call.  That is how Emacs development works for many years.  I
agree that in this case the change should have been discussed more
thoroughly in advance -- but that is exactly what Paul said he regrets
he hadn't done.  So the lesson has been learned, and we are now wiser
about this and similar issues that could come up in the future.

> It's a non backward-compatible change to a critical bit of Emacs.
> `message' was previously a logical, strong function, and it has been
> turned into a messy function which sort of works most of the time.

IME, it works quite well all of the time.  Where it has some
deficiencies, I'm sure we will with time improve it so it works even
better.  That's my experience in Emacs for many years.

And with that, I think it's high time to end this discussion.