Subject: Re: bug#72554: 31.0.50; misleading release information for 'always'

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 10 Aug 2024 14:42:04 +0300

> From: Ulrich Mueller <[email-masked]>
> Date: Sat, 10 Aug 2024 13:16:35 +0200
> 
> "C-h f always RET" says:
> 
>    always is a byte-compiled Lisp function in ‘subr.el’.
>    [...]
> 
>      Probably introduced at or before Emacs version 25.1.
>      This function does not change global state, including the match data.
> 
> However, 'always' only appeared in Emacs 28, so that information is
> misleading when trying to write backwards compatible code.
> 
> (It's less of a problem when the version that is shown is greater than
> the actual first release, which I think happens more often.)
> 
> Not sure how to fix this. Maybe exclude common English words (which
> are likely to appear in NEWS* without being the name of a function)
> from scanning in help-fns.el?

help-fns--first-release-regexp is supposed to find only quoted names,
so the problem is not with common words.  I think it finds this in
NEWS.25:

  *** New value 'always' for 'sh-indent-after-continuation'.
                ^^^^^^^^

So maybe we should reject matches that immediately follow "value" or
"values".  That won't reject all false positives, but it should be an
improvement, I think.