Subject: bug#58992: 28.2; "lax space matching" no longer works

From: Vincent Lefevre <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 4 Nov 2022 14:04:14 +0100

On 2022-11-04 13:52:52 +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > Date: Fri, 4 Nov 2022 11:56:37 +0100
> > From: Vincent Lefevre <[email-masked]>
> > Cc: [email-masked]
> > 
> > I've searched on the web and found the Emacs wiki
> > 
> >   https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/RegularExpression
> > 
> > It even encourages the use of "\s-" for searching: this is a page
> > mainly for searching (see the first line of the text), and in the
> > "Regexp Syntax Basics" (note: *basics*):
> > 
> >   \sc      character with c syntax (e.g. \s- for whitespace char)
> > 
> > So users are very likely to use it.
> 
> The Emacs project is not responsible for what the wiki says, and at
> least I take every opportunity to tell users to treat what it says
> with a grain of salt.  Emacs comes with very detailed manuals, and
> they and the doc strings should be used as the definitive
> documentation, not the wiki or SE or any other place.

The Emacs manuals are very detailed, but this is also an issue: it
may be difficult for the user to distinguish between details and
important things (in particular, when they are unintuitive, as for
behavior different from standards and other applications). The wiki
is a good example: even experts (who contributed to the wiki) can
be wrong or give bad advice. So when there is something misleading,
the manual should give big warnings and make sure that the user
will see them.

Also note that regexps are used everywhere, in many applications,
and users should not be expected to read again and again *whole*
parts of the manuals about common things like regexps.

-- 
Vincent Lefèvre <[email-masked]> - Web: <https://www.vinc17.net/>
100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <https://www.vinc17.net/blog/>
Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / AriC project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)