GNU bug report logs - #35564
27.0.50; [PATCH] Tweak dired-do-shell-command warning about "wildcard" characters

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From: Drew Adams <drew.adams <at> oracle.com>
To: Kévin Le Gouguec <kevin.legouguec <at> gmail.com>, Noam Postavsky <npostavs <at> gmail.com>
Cc: 35564 <at> debbugs.gnu.org, Stefan Monnier <monnier <at> iro.umontreal.ca>
Subject: bug#35564: [PATCH v3] Tweak dired warning about "wildcard" characters
Date: Fri, 28 Jun 2019 08:35:41 -0700 (PDT)

(Apologies if I missed something - I took only a
quick look at the patches and the bug report.)

The old question 

 "Confirm--do you mean to use `*' as a wildcard? "

Seemed clear enough, I thought.  But I see now from
the bug report that it could be confusing.

But the new question (and actually it's not even a
question - it should be, no?) seems even less clear
to me:

 "Confirm--the highlighted characters will not be substituted:"

(And too long - "highlighted chars won't be substituted"
says the same thing as "the highlighted...".)

Maybe something like this?

 "Should highlighted chars be substituted? "

or

 "Substitute highlighted occurrences of `*'? "

But see next -

1. It's not clear to me what someone will understand
   by "substituted" here.  What would (otherwise) be
   substituted for what, where, and for what purpose?
   What substitution are we talking about, and how
   would a user be expected to know what we mean, here?

2. Are there multiple different "characterS" involved,
   or is the confirmation about only _one_ character,
   in (possibly) multiple locations - occurrences of
   one char?

3. Is it the case that the new prompt does not, itself,
   show the character?  Do you have to look elsewhere
   to see which char or chars(?) are meant by the
   prompt?  Shouldn't the prompt itself show the char?

I think more thought might need to be put into this,
by those who understand what the code actually does,
ways in which the resulting behavior could be
confusing, and just what it is we're asking the user
to confirm.

(I'm not one who really understands all of this. I'm
just saying that my guess is that things are still
not so clear after the patching.)

A final comment, which I'm not sure is relevant:

We should not, in any case, _rely_ on any
highlighting to get across meaning (semantics).
Highlighting should always be an extra - a
nice-to-have.  Some users will not see the
highlighting - it cannot be the only thing that
gets the intended meaning across.

(Again, I'm not saying that we _are_ relying on
highlighting this way.  I just want to be sure
we're not.  We don't want to unnecessarily
introduce an accessibility problem.)

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