bug#25107: Acknowledgement (Patches to clean up ispell.el)

[Reuben Thomas]

On 6 December 2016 at 16:37, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:

> From: Reuben Thomas <rrt@sc3d.org>
> Date: Tue, 6 Dec 2016 16:20:24 +0000
> Cc: 25107@debbugs.gnu.org
>
>  Why is it useful to remove this information? The documentation of the
>  spell-checkers themselves leaves a lot to be desired, so asking the
>  users to go consult it might not be appreciated. I'd rather add here
>  the missing info about the other spellers.
>
> ​Emacs is enough for us to document without trying to document third-party software. Since all the software
> involved is free, better to fix it directly, and benefit all its users, rather than take on the burden of documenting
> it in order only to benefit Emacs users.

I agree with the general point, but in this case we are talking about
mentioning a small number of file names in the doc string.  Doesn't
seem like a burden to me, and whoever put that information there
probably didn't see it as such, either.

​In that case I will add the information for Enchant. At least it is not likely to change.​

I'm not saying it is much of a burden, but it is the sort of small burden that can contribute to death-by-a-thousand-cuts. I guess we disagree over what the threshold is; in this case I'm quite happy to cede that none of the locations we mention is likely to change as all the spellcheckers documented there are mature.

I was thinking about someone using the result to report the version
they have, e.g. as part of a bug report.

​​Version of what? If of Emacs, then that version information is already provided by report-emacs-bug. If of a spellchecker, then that information is still provided by the revised message.

Sorry if I'm overlooking something obvious here!​

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