Subject: bug#74630: 31.0.50; emacs-mail-verify

From: Richard Stallman <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 04 Dec 2024 01:09:05 -0500

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > I guess you meant epa-mail-verify?

Oops, yes.

  > Not sure what you expected the doc string to say.  Would the below be
  > enough?

  >   Verify OpenPGP cleartext signed messages in the current buffer.
  >   The buffer is expected to contain a mail message.

  >   If the verification fails, the command signals an error.

That is better, becauee it gives enough information to deduce what
indicates success.  But the user should need to do any deduction about
that, let alone read code and guess what some other functions do.

To make the doc string truly clear, it should say explicitly what
indicates success.  That way the user can know, rather than just
supposing.

Should the function be changed to display a message, "Signature verified",
on success?

Do some people run this function from a hook for every message and
want to see output only in case of failure?

Should it a value indicating success or failure?

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)