Subject: bug#62009: 29.0.60; Emacs crashes on setf symbol-name

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2023 17:37:16 +0200

> Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2023 15:16:36 +0000
> From: Gregory Heytings <[email-masked]>
> cc: Daniel Mendler <[email-masked]>, [email-masked], 
>     [email-masked], [email-masked], [email-masked], 
>     [email-masked], [email-masked]
> 
> 
> >
> > Sorry, I object to any change to cater for this use case.
> >
> 
> IMO a reasonable change here would be to update the docstring of 
> symbol-name, which only says "Return SYMBOL's name, a string.", with a 
> warning similar to the one in the manual:
> 
> Warning: Changing the string by substituting characters does change the 
> name of the symbol, but fails to update the obarray, so don't do it!

That is okay, of course.  My objection was to the code changes.

> Perhaps we could also explicitly mention, in the docstring and/or in the 
> manual, that doing that can also crash Emacs.

I think being a bit vague here and talking about "dangers" should be
good enough, since not every such code will crash, and probably also
not on every platform and in every build configuration.