GNU bug report logs - #23425
master branch: `message' wrongly corrupts ' to curly quote.

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From: Alan Mackenzie <acm <at> muc.de>
To: David Engster <deng <at> randomsample.de>
Cc: Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>, 23425 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#23425: master branch: `message' wrongly corrupts ' to curly quote.
Date: Sat, 10 Jun 2017 13:01:01 +0000

Hello, David.

On Sat, Jun 10, 2017 at 12:52:44 +0200, David Engster wrote:
> Alan Mackenzie writes:
> > I suggest that you now apologise for what you did back in August 2015,
> > promising never to do the same thing again.

> 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.  What you quote
is colloquially known as a "non-apology".  If you look carefully at it,
you'll see it attributes the blame to somebody else ("With the benefit
of hindsight, I now see that I was mistaken about how strongly some
users are attached to quoting `like this'") and that attribution is
somewhat insulting and one-sided, it makes no offer to fix things, and
the undertaking not to repeat is less than wholehearted ("I will
_strive_ ... to publicize ... on emacs-devel _more_ _prominently_").
Does that ostensible apology give you much confidence that Paul won't do
the same thing again?  I have my doubts.

> I'm not happy with that change either, but Paul has worked on Emacs for
> 25 years, with almost 5000 commits on record. This does not make him
> infallible, but calling him a 'rogue' is just unacceptable.

I really wish you hadn't accused me of that after snipping my text so
that people couldn't see the two together.  What I actually wrote was
"IN THIS CASE, you are that rogue", meaning in this particular instance.
I stand by that allegation.  What I didn't do was to call Paul a rogue
in general.

I'm clearly not happy with this change.  I'd be as unhappy about it if
Paul had already written 50,000 commits, or it had been written by RMS.
But, to repeat myself, I'm most unhappy that it was slipped into Emacs
bypassing the customary discussion process.

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.  I
don't think this is good.

> -David

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).

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