Subject: Re: bug#25107: Acknowledgement (Patches to clean up ispell.el)

From: Reuben Thomas <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 6 Dec 2016 17:46:23 +0000

On 6 December 2016 at 16:37, Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]> wrote:

> > From: Reuben Thomas <[email-masked]>
> > Date: Tue, 6 Dec 2016 16:20:24 +0000
> > Cc: [email-masked]
> >
> >  Why is it useful to remove this information? The documentation of the
> >  spell-checkers themselves leaves a lot to be desired, so asking the
> >  users to go consult it might not be appreciated. I'd rather add here
> >  the missing info about the other spellers.
> >
> > ​Emacs is enough for us to document without trying to document
> third-party software. Since all the software
> > involved is free, better to fix it directly, and benefit all its users,
> rather than take on the burden of documenting
> > it in order only to benefit Emacs users.
>
> I agree with the general point, but in this case we are talking about
> mentioning a small number of file names in the doc string.  Doesn't
> seem like a burden to me, and whoever put that information there
> probably didn't see it as such, either.
>

​In that case I will add the information for Enchant. At least it is not
likely to change.​

I'm not saying it is much of a burden, but it is the sort of small burden
that can contribute to death-by-a-thousand-cuts. I guess we disagree over
what the threshold is; in this case I'm quite happy to cede that none of
the locations we mention is likely to change as all the spellcheckers
documented there are mature.

I was thinking about someone using the result to report the version
> they have, e.g. as part of a bug report.
>

​​Version of what? If of Emacs, then that version information is already
provided by report-emacs-bug. If of a spellchecker, then that information
is still provided by the revised message.

Sorry if I'm overlooking something obvious here!​

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