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

[Reuben Thomas]

On 6 December 2016 at 18:01, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:

> From: Reuben Thomas <rrt@sc3d.org>
> Date: Tue, 6 Dec 2016 17:46:23 +0000
> Cc: 25107@debbugs.gnu.org
>
>  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.​

Sure, that's what I meant.

>  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.

It's admittedly a minor issue, but just to make myself clear: I
thought about reporting the version not as part of report-emacs-bug.

Or let me ask this: why does ispell-version at all exist?  Perhaps I'm
confused about its purpose.

​My understanding is that it exists for reporting bugs in the combination of ispell.el and whatever spell checker you are using. When ispell.el was distributed as third-party code, there were extra two useful pieces of information: the version of the spell-checker program, and the version of ispell.el.

Now, there is just one extra piece of information, the version of the spell-checker program.

One would presumably also want the version of Emacs in a bug report, but we don't print this out all over the place; we provide the convenience of report-emacs-bug, and otherwise expect users to put it manually in the report.

​So, emacs-version does not substitute for the old ispell.el version; the old ispell.el version has simply become unnecessary, and I've removed it. The Emacs version is still needed for a bug report, but there's no reason that ispell.el (or any other core package) should show emacs-version specially, when there are already user-friendly ways to automatically put it in bug reports.​

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