Philipp Stephani <
address@hidden> schrieb am So., 27. Nov. 2016 um 22:13 Uhr:
Drew Adams <
address@hidden> schrieb am Mi., 23. Nov. 2016 um 17:35 Uhr:
> >> the docstring created by define-minor-mode with nil DOC is useful
> >> and often better than what users write.
> >> Should DOC therefore be optional?
> >
> > Not sure we would like to educate Lisp programmers to stop
> > thinking about good doc strings.
>
> I agree.
Me too. And definers of user-facing things, such as
defcustom and defface, do require DOC. Other definers,
such as defconst and defvar, do not require it.
On the other hand, OP raises a real issue, I think.
I'd be in favor of (somehow) automatically having the
definer-provided DOC be augmented by a link that shows
the generic `define-minor-mode' doc, or similar.
IOW:
1. Definers should need to provide a DOC string (even if
they can fake it with "", which is not encouraged).
2. Users of the mode should have access to the generic
information also. It should be sufficient that the
DOC in the definition provides mode-specific information.
It should not need to tell users general things about
using a minor mode.
That sounds like a good approach.
Do you have a good idea how to design the interface for this? I was thinking about something like this: Create a new help type, "mode", analogous to "variable" and "function". The documentation for the mode would be different from the toggle command and the mode variable, which would get a generic docstring. C-h o and C-h m would show the mode docstring instead of the toggle command docstring. The mode docstring would contain only a description of the mode itself, not the toggle command.
The primary downside is that many mode docstrings are written to be applicable to the toggle command. Maybe `define-minor-mode' could grow a :doc keyword argument for the mode docstring to preserve backward compatibility.