Subject: Re: bug#68947: 30.0.50; Gnus article mode keybindings

From: Eric Abrahamsen <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 10 Feb 2024 10:59:21 -0800

On 02/10/24 20:15 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> Cc: [email-masked]
>> From: Eric Abrahamsen <[email-masked]>
>> Date: Sat, 10 Feb 2024 10:09:14 -0800
>> 
>> Your immediate issue is caused by the fact that
>> `gnus-article-describe-bindings', which theoretically should be
>> responsible for telling the user about all the redirections, is only
>> aware of the "S" keymap prefix. It doesn't know all the ways in which an
>> 'undefined binding might get translated into a valid summary-mode
>> command, and can't show you those.
>> 
>> To be honest, I don't think I'm going to be able to fix this. If we keep
>> the current implementation, `gnus-article-describe-bindings' would have
>> to be made aware of the additional redirections, and I wouldn't even
>> know where to start.
>> 
>> It could be that Elisp has better tools for this situation by now (the
>> original architecture was in place before 1997), but I'm not sure what
>> those tools are. Perhaps someone will chime in with a helpful
>> suggestion...
>
> Strange as it may sound, I see no grave problem here: C-h is not
> guaranteed to work after any arbitrary prefix, anyway.  So if that is
> too hard to fix, we could just punt and leave it unsolved.

I'm inclined to say it's too hard to fix! The only cleaner solution I
can think of is to actually define article-mode versions of all the
summary-mode commands we'd want to call, which would also provide a
place to do the necessary article-specific adjustments. That's a lot of
very tightly-coupled code, though.

> What about "C-h b" -- does that work in the situation described by the
> recipe?

No, that doesn't really work. The gnus-article-mode bindings are listed
under a "fundamental-mode Major Mode Bindings:" heading (??). That
includes gnus-article-mode's own keybindings, and the summary-mode
bindings that have been explicitly attached at the "S" prefix, but
nothing else.