Changes in dos-fns.el

[Eli Zaretskii]

  2010-05-13  Stefan Monnier  <address@hidden>

          * dos-fns.el: Add "dos-" prefix for namespace control.
          (convert-standard-filename): Define as alias for
          dos-convert-standard-filename but only if applicable.

The more I think about these changes, the less I like them.

These functions are very old, some from 1996, others from 1994, and in
all that time no one complained about them.  What kind of use-case was
important enough to change their names now in an incompatible fashion?

Yes, I've read the comments about convert-standard-filename.  Again,
no one complained about what happens when someone loads dos-fns on
other platforms.  Why is this suddenly an issue now?  And if its _is_
an issue, why it gets fixed only in dos-fns, not in other places where
we have overriding definitions for this function?  In any case, I
could think of better ways of fixing this.  For example, we could lump
all the definitions in the body of a single function on file.el, each
alternative conditioned by the underlying OS.

But if I could somehow understand the motivation for the change of
convert-standard-filename, I have no idea what are the advantages of
renaming venerable functions such as intdos and mode4350.  Can they
really cause name clashes?  And if they can, how come that didn't
happen even once in the last 15 years?  Besides, mode25 and mode4350
are documented in the manual, and I expect them to be fairly popular
amongst DOS users (when I was one, I had a call to mode4350 in my
.emacs).  Why change the name now without leaving behind a defalias?

Unless I miss some very important aspects of this, I really, REALLY
think we should revert these changes.