bug#31772: 26.1; (thing-at-point 'list) regression

[Leo Liu]

On 2018-06-11 00:21 +0900, Tino Calancha wrote:
> Initially I thought that; after discuss with Emacs colleages
> I changed my mine.
>
> If you are in a buffer in emacs-lisp-mode, I just see
> one list of length 3 in the following line:
> ("foo" "(bar)" "baz")
>
> "(bar)" is a string.

I think you are solving the problem the wrong way. The original
behaviour of (thing-at-point 'list) relied on up-list and is intuitive
and sensible. After all who doesn't use up-list/down-list/kill-sexp etc.
(thing-at-point 'list) is well-aligned with them simply by letting
up-list do it.

But the point is a decade-old function that is functional and used in
people's init or packages are changed in drastically incompatible way. I
noticed the issue only after upgrade to emacs 26.1 a few days ago and
discovered https://github.com/leoliu/easy-kill/issues/28.

*SIDE NOTE*

One of the issues with Emacs development (I feel it more deeply after I
changed to use stable releases), people (in most cases only 1 user) find
some feature doesn't entirely suit their needs and they change it often
without full-perspective how it is used. For emacs 26.1 I have at least
three irritating annoyances (not counting crashes which are often beyond
my reach) that I need to code away one way or another.

Leo