Subject: Re: bug#24353: 25.1.1: looking-back wrong info

From: Michael Heerdegen <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 04 Sep 2016 15:08:23 +0200

Drew Adams <[email-masked]> writes:

> And yes, "the whole point of advertised-calling-convention is to
> advertise a signature different from the actual implemented one."

I always thought this would be just a temporary, intermediate state,
and the second argument will be made mandatory soon (is that wrong?).

With other words, we already give the impression that the second arg is
mandatory, in all regards, to force people to change their code.  But we
don't break old code yet, it is still running, until some later version.

And I think this is good: you can still supply (point-min) as limit if
you really don't care, but you should make the decision, because it is
important to make that decision consciously, and that's why we make the
LIMIT arg mandatory.

Sure, the effect of `advertized-calling-convention' could be improved to
be less confusing, e.g. it could add automatically to the doc something
like "the old signature ... is obsolete but currently still supported"
or so.

If we use `advertized-calling-convention' for anything else then
obsoleting signatures - like giving recommendations of how to call a
function the best way, I would agree that this would not be a good
thing, and it would be better to use the documentation string for this
purpose.

Michael.