Subject: bug#31796: 27.1; dired-do-find-regexp-and-replace fails to find multiline regexps

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2020 17:16:46 +0200

> From: Andreas Abel <[email-masked]>
> Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2020 00:49:24 +0100
> 
> We value stability and conservativity over everything else.

We do, too.  If you stick around for a while, you will see how many
discussions here are due to the determination not to introduce even
the slightest risk of breaking compatibility with existing behavior.
In fact, some of the passion in Dmitry's response wasn't directed at
you, it was directed at myself and other senior maintainers who
frequently object to changes and/or request complicated
backward-compatibility shims, for that very reason.

So please don't assume we don't care about stability, or don't care
enough.  It would be simply unfair to make such assumptions.  We
certainly don't need lectures about keeping Emacs stable and
compatible.

What you see in this case is not the result of negligence or
carelessness, it is the result of not being aware of this (relatively
rare) use case becoming broken when we changed the UI of this and
similar commands to a more convenient one.  It took time for people to
report the problem, and it takes us more time to come up with a good
solution.  That's all.

If you have practical ideas for how to support these use cases with
the current command, please describe them.  TIA.