Subject: bug#79469: 31.0.50; Ungrammatical sentence from describe-function

From: Stephen Berman <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 19 Sep 2025 20:35:26 +0200

On Fri, 19 Sep 2025 18:53:34 +0300 Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]> wrote:

>> From: Stephen Berman <[email-masked]>
>> Cc: [email-masked],  [email-masked]
>> Date: Fri, 19 Sep 2025 17:03:22 +0200
>> 
>> > If we don't care about being wrong in some cases, then why fix this to
>> > begin with?
>> 
>> AFAIK there are no cases in the current code for which the fix I
>> proposed (in any of the variants) is wrong, and the last version is
>> likely to DTRT for many, if not all, plausible future additions to the
>> repertoire of functions type symbols.  I think a fix that would work in
>> all possible cases would require consulting a large wordlist (that would
>> have to be continually updated) and I don't think this issue justifies
>> implementing and maintaining such a fix.  But I do think it's better to
>> have a limited fix known to work with the current code base than to
>> leave such a silly bug in Emacs.
>
> From where I stand, it is not a bug, and certainly isn't silly.

Are you saying that code that unintentionally (and not by design, as
with messages or doc strings that omit articles to save space) produces
ungrammatical English in the help system is not a bug?  If so, that's a
surprising and rather disturbing statement coming from an Emacs
maintainer.  And the bug is silly because if the ungrammatical string
were not generated by code but written by a human, it would rightly be
treated as a typo and corrected without hesitation or discussion.

> Don't we have anything better to do to improve Emacs?

Sure, but not everyone who wants to improve Emacs can tackle the biggest
issues; I hope you don't mean to imply that those who feel motivated to
make less important improvements should not do so.  And in particular
fixes for less important bugs like this one should not be rejected just
because they are not as general as possible: that would be like
demanding disproportiate effort for small bug fixes, which in practice
would be like saying we don't care about fixing small bugs.

Steve Berman