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The specific case I'm interested in at the moment, commit 4e05bbf5117744fcef744e787fe74d563b09ed53 from git://git.sv.gnu.org/emacs.git, the comment says only:

(adaptive-fill-regexp): Don't match `(1)' or `1.'

But why? Why was this change made?

On some projects authors link commit comments to related bug or feature request discussions. And that would have been helpful here.

As you can imagine, it's rather fraught to customize adaptive-fill-regexp by changing it to a small difference from the default: there's no way (that I can think of! :-) to pick up future enhancements to the default (other than to manually check it after every new release, which would be tedious).

user98761
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    The comments for the variable in an older version of Emacs that I use state: "*RMS: deleted the code to match `1.` and `(1)`.*" Type `M-x find-variable` and see if your version of Emacs says something similar. I believe those initials stand for the creator or Emacs who stayed on board years afterwards as part of the development team. It might be interesting to look up the git history of the function that uses the variable at issue, e.g., `vc-region-history` if you have the source code installed with git. – lawlist Dec 06 '22 at 02:28
  • that's still RMS's email address. you could email him and ask ;) – nega Dec 06 '22 at 02:59
  • What in particular about this commit from 2006 has you so concerned? – nega Dec 06 '22 at 03:22

2 Answers2

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A “rationale” is a thing that exists first and foremost in a human mind. If the human didn’t write it down, perhaps you should ask them.

db48x
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adaptive-fill-regexp is a customizable variable. It is intended for it to be changed by the user according to their needs. If the user does change it, a new default is irrelevant because the user's settings will take precedence.

nega
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  • For something simple -- like a boolean flag or an integer count of something -- yes, that makes sense. However, this regexp is essentially a list of punctuation characters to be accepted as bullet markers. Years ago, I wanted to add "+" to that list. If I simply copied the default and added my "+", then I would miss out on any additional punctuation that were later added to the default. For example, commit 81746738bb added the "en dash" (and by the way also included exactly the sort of bug database citation I'm talking about!). – user98761 Dec 06 '22 at 17:15
  • Defaults change. Software changes. Development practices change. In 2006, GNU Emacs wasn't even in git. There have been 96952 commits since then. I'm sure many of them have changed default settings. – nega Dec 06 '22 at 18:59