Subject: Re: bug#30073: 27.0.50; dired-do-delete ignores customization for short answers

From: Juri Linkov <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Jan 2018 23:11:30 +0200

>> How many callers does it have now, and which callers are those?
>
> Currently it will have just one caller in ‘dired-delete-file’,
> but it's possible to gradually replace all callers that are using
> ‘yes-or-no-p’ and ‘y-or-n-p’ with equivalent calls of ‘read-answer’

Sorry, I meant only ‘yes-or-no-p’, not ‘y-or-n-p’.

For ‘y-or-n-p’ there is no problem, and also there are several alternatives
like ‘map-y-or-n-p’, ‘read-multiple-choice’...

But ‘yes-or-no-p’ is different because it's used for potentially
dangerous operations and should require typing long answers by default.
Only when the user gives explicit consent it should allow shorter answers.

Actually this is like long and short options on command line,
e.g. as described in (info "(coreutils) Common options"):

 "Most programs that accept long options recognize unambiguous
  abbreviations of those options.  For example, `rmdir
  --ignore-fail-on-non-empty' can be invoked as `rmdir --ignore-fail' or
  even `rmdir --i'."