Eldoc mode in eval-minibuffer

[Eli Zaretskii]

About a week ago Emacs on trunk started turning on eldoc-mode whenever
you type M-:, with the effect that a large portion of the mode line
gets overwritten "displaced" by information about the forms you type
into the minibuffer.

Besides the usual gripes about such prominent changes in behavior
being made during feature freeze, I have the following complaints:

 . This change doesn't seem to be mentioned in NEWS.  The closest
   thing is this laconic note:

    ** Eldoc Mode works properly in the minibuffer.

   Good luck understanding from this that it is now turned on in the
   minibuffer _by_default_.  It took me several minutes to figure out
   who or what did this to my mode line.  Showing this to Emacs users,
   let alone newbies, is an excellent candidate for an exam whose
   purpose is to detect heirs to Stefan as head maintainer.

 . Since it is not in NEWS, chances are it will never get mentioned in
   the manual, which is bad for default behavior.

 . There doesn't seem to be any way of turning this feature off,
   except by setting eldoc-idle-delay to some ridiculously high value.
   Consequently, 'customize-changed-options' will not say a word about
   this new feature.  That's not Emacs'y.

 . Why does it make sense to show this information when you eval in
   the minibuffer, but not when you eval in *scratch* or in IELM?  The
   latter two sound like much better candidates for this feature.

 . I don't think turning this on by default in eval-minibuffer was
   ever seriously discussed.  The ChangeLog entry refers to an obscure
   bug report, but the discussions of that bug (which I have read at
   the time, as I do with all bugs) never explicitly said anything
   about the effect I see.  Makes me think that perhaps all this is
   some mistake or unintentional consequence.

Apologies if I'm missing something obvious.