Subject: Re: bug#59217: [PATCH] guix: lint: Improve message in linter warning.

From: Maxim Cournoyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2023 15:50:32 -0400

Hi,

Arun Isaac <[email-masked]> writes:

>> Well, maybe a paragraph in the manual under ’(guix) Synopses and
>> Descriptions’ is a better location for such explanations than the linter
>> message itself.  WDYT?
>
> That sounds good. Detailed explanations do belong in the manual. But,
> the linter CLI output should link to the relevant section of the web
> manual. That would be better than sending people hunting in the
> manual. Many good linters for other programming languages do do this.

Instead of a bug in Emacs, I'd say it's rather a convention, rooted in
the fact that without the two-spaces trick, how would you reliably
locate the end of a sentence?  A period followed by a capital letter
might happen in the middle of a sentence, which makes it ambiguous.
Note that two-spaces also exists as a typographical convention, called
"double sentence spacing".  Here's some interesting quote from the
Wikipedia page [0]:

   The text-editing environment in Emacs uses a double space following a
   period to identify the end of sentences unambiguously; the
   double-space convention prevents confusion with periods within
   sentences that signify abbreviations. How Emacs recognizes the end of
   a sentence is controlled by the settings sentence-end-double-space
   and sentence-end.[71]

   The Unix typesetter program Troff uses two spaces to mark the end of
   a sentence.[72] This allows the typesetter to distinguish sentence
   endings from abbreviations and to typeset them differently. Early
   versions of Troff,[72] which only typeset in fixed-width fonts, would
   automatically add a second space between sentences, which were
   detected based on the combination of terminal punctuation and a line
   feed.

Personally, I'd prefer not having explanations directly in the output of
Guix lint; it should be terse, as it's involved often and repeatedly.

[0]  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing

-- 
Thanks,
Maxim