Package: emacs;
Reported by: Sebastian Miele <iota <at> whxvd.name>
Date: Mon, 24 Jul 2023 16:49:02 UTC
Severity: normal
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From: Sebastian Miele <iota <at> whxvd.name> To: 64835 <at> debbugs.gnu.org Subject: bug#64835: ‘describe-variable’ unconditionally let-binds ‘print-circle’ to t Date: Mon, 24 Jul 2023 18:42:09 +0200
That was not the case in Emacs 28. It seems to have been introduced in the following commit: 2c18969c810f338d73beda592ee5af7103132e97 Author: Stefan Monnier <monnier <at> iro.umontreal.ca> AuthorDate: Thu Mar 2 02:08:08 2017 -0500 Commit: Stefan Monnier <monnier <at> iro.umontreal.ca> CommitDate: Thu Mar 2 02:08:32 2017 -0500 * lisp/help-fns.el (describe-variable): Use cl-print for the value Use `pp-buffer' rather than `pp' so as to avoid calling prin1 twice. 2017 is a while ago. The first pretest release of Emacs 28 was in December 2021. So the commit must have entered the current emacs-29 branch in some "non-linear" way. The problem is that the effect of ‘print-circle’ being t pertains to all sharing, not just sharing that leads to circles. And that has the effect, that the output can become arbitrarily unreadable. Consider for example: (require 'ispell) (ispell-set-spellchecker-params) (describe-variable 'ispell-dictionary-alist) The display of the value in my machine contains, e.g., "(nil #1# #2# #3# t #4# nil utf-8)". I do not see the reason for hard-coding ‘print-circle’ to t in ‘describe-variable’. The only reason I can imagine would be the prevention of infinite loops. But that cannot be the case, because even with ‘print-circle’ nil, the printing routines seem to check for circularity and handle it gracefully in the output. Is this a bug or a necessity that I do not understand, yet? The NEWS file does not mention this change. In general (and somewhat unrelated), it would be nice if ‘print-circle’ would be split into two things: (1) make explicit all sharing (as is done now), and (2) make explicit only a subset of sharing that resolves all circles. (The latter would in at least two aspects still be different from the graceful handling mentioned above when ‘print-circle’ is nil.) ----- In GNU Emacs 29.1 (build 1, x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 3.24.38, cairo version 1.17.8) of 2023-07-23 built on huette Repository revision: 906ecf442c43da98e6b8c7488f549691901690e9 Repository branch: emacs-29 Windowing system distributor 'The X.Org Foundation', version 11.0.12101008 System Description: Arch Linux Configured using: 'configure --with-x-toolkit=gtk --with-native-compilation=yes --with-tree-sitter --with-json --with-mailutils --with-imagemagick' Configured features: ACL CAIRO DBUS FREETYPE GIF GLIB GMP GNUTLS GPM GSETTINGS HARFBUZZ IMAGEMAGICK JPEG JSON LCMS2 LIBOTF LIBSYSTEMD LIBXML2 M17N_FLT MODULES NATIVE_COMP NOTIFY INOTIFY PDUMPER PNG RSVG SECCOMP SOUND SQLITE3 THREADS TIFF TOOLKIT_SCROLL_BARS TREE_SITTER WEBP X11 XDBE XIM XINPUT2 XPM GTK3 ZLIB Important settings: value of $LC_COLLATE: C value of $LANG: C.UTF-8 locale-coding-system: utf-8-unix Major mode: Lisp Interaction Minor modes in effect: tooltip-mode: t global-eldoc-mode: t eldoc-mode: t show-paren-mode: t electric-indent-mode: t mouse-wheel-mode: t tool-bar-mode: t menu-bar-mode: t file-name-shadow-mode: t global-font-lock-mode: t font-lock-mode: t blink-cursor-mode: t line-number-mode: t indent-tabs-mode: t transient-mark-mode: t auto-composition-mode: t auto-encryption-mode: t auto-compression-mode: t Load-path shadows: None found. Features: (shadow sort mail-extr emacsbug message mailcap yank-media puny dired dired-loaddefs rfc822 mml mml-sec password-cache epa derived epg rfc6068 epg-config gnus-util mm-decode mm-bodies mm-encode mail-parse rfc2231 mailabbrev gmm-utils mailheader sendmail rfc2047 rfc2045 ietf-drums mm-util mail-prsvr mail-utils pp shortdoc text-property-search mouse-copy mouse-drag thingatpt time-date cl-print byte-opt help-fns radix-tree ispell comp comp-cstr warnings icons subr-x rx cl-seq cl-macs gv cl-extra help-mode cl-loaddefs cl-lib bytecomp byte-compile rmc iso-transl tooltip cconv eldoc paren electric uniquify ediff-hook vc-hooks lisp-float-type elisp-mode mwheel term/x-win x-win term/common-win x-dnd tool-bar dnd fontset image regexp-opt fringe tabulated-list replace newcomment text-mode lisp-mode prog-mode register page tab-bar menu-bar rfn-eshadow isearch easymenu timer select scroll-bar mouse jit-lock font-lock syntax font-core term/tty-colors frame minibuffer nadvice seq simple cl-generic indonesian philippine cham georgian utf-8-lang misc-lang vietnamese tibetan thai tai-viet lao korean japanese eucjp-ms cp51932 hebrew greek romanian slovak czech european ethiopic indian cyrillic chinese composite emoji-zwj charscript charprop case-table epa-hook jka-cmpr-hook help abbrev obarray oclosure cl-preloaded button loaddefs theme-loaddefs faces cus-face macroexp files window text-properties overlay sha1 md5 base64 format env code-pages mule custom widget keymap hashtable-print-readable backquote threads dbusbind inotify lcms2 dynamic-setting system-font-setting font-render-setting cairo move-toolbar gtk x-toolkit xinput2 x multi-tty make-network-process native-compile emacs) Memory information: ((conses 16 102484 8121) (symbols 48 7638 0) (strings 32 28748 4608) (string-bytes 1 869676) (vectors 16 19807) (vector-slots 8 344131 11905) (floats 8 148 62) (intervals 56 1312 1) (buffers 984 14))
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