GNU bug report logs - #58992
28.2; "lax space matching" no longer works

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Message #130 received at 58992 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org>
To: Vincent Lefevre <vincent <at> vinc17.net>
Cc: 58992 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: Re: bug#58992: 28.2; "lax space matching" no longer works
Date: Fri, 04 Nov 2022 15:40:38 +0200

> Date: Fri, 4 Nov 2022 14:04:14 +0100
> From: Vincent Lefevre <vincent <at> vinc17.net>
> Cc: 58992 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
> 
> 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.

I added notes to the manual about syntax and case tables that affect
regexps, but your expectations are in general impractical: there's no
way we could guarantee that reading some short excerpt from a manual
will capture all the possible caveats.  This is simply too complex an
issue to allow that, sorry.  So yes, users are expected to read whole
parts of the manual, including the cross-referenced nodes.  There's no
way around that.

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