Subject: bug#77666: Question/discussion about `trusted-content'

From: Stefan Kangas <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 15 Apr 2025 19:06:59 -0500

Dominik Schrempf <[email-masked]> writes:

> Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]> writes:
>
>> Emacs predates realpath and friends, so we had this terminology first,
>> and we cannot change it now, since it's so old.
>
> Good to know, thank you.
>
> In your opinion, what is the reason of why we can not change such names?
> Is this because (1) we do not have enough resources to change such
> discrepancies in nomenclature, or (2) because we are not willing to
> change nomenclature, or (3) we must ensure backwards compatibility?

It usually comes down to a combination of 2 and 3.

Occasionally it's 1 also, for example this is why "window" is not called
"pane" or something that makes sense in 2025.

> (I just grepped for "truename" in the Emacs repository and got 942 hits).
>
> Independently of what we can change or not, I think it is important to
> reduce discrepancies in nomenclature. Thanks for hearing me out!

It's a worthwhile goal, but has to be weighed against the pain of
changing.

One way we could change things without a huge amount of pain would be

    (defalias 'file-name-real #'file-truename)

But marking such an alias obsolete, as we sometimes do, would be
prohibitively expensive and not worth it.  So we'd have to live with
both names essentially forever, which is also not free.

More practically, should the docstring of `file-truename` mention that
this is the same as the "real" file name on GNU/Linux?  I think that
could help some users.  We could also add an index entry to the info
manual.  Eli, WDYT?