Subject: bug#60040: 29.0.50; flymake manual should document language support

From: Stefan Kangas <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2022 10:20:57 -0800

Severity: wishlist

Please consider adding a new chapter in (info "(flymake) Top") that
documents all built-in flymake support, and how to enable them
automatically.

I think such a chapter could also document the languages known to be
supported in packages on GNU ELPA and NonGNU ELPA.

It is currently hard to know which modes support flymake-mode, without
testing it in each mode.  For example, I don't see that
`flymake-texinfo' or `perl-flymake' are currently documented anywhere
outside of their docstrings.

You can use `M-x apropos-function RET flymake RET', of course, but that
requires users to know implementation details of flymake (how to
implement a backend), as well as know that the functions must be loaded
(or autoloaded) for that to work, and finally you need to filter out a
lot of internal flymake implementation details and similar.

Note in particular that this is useful whether or not it is already
documented in the documentation for the respective packages (which it
most often is not, AFAICT).

See also:
https://www.flycheck.org/en/29/languages.html#flycheck-languages