Re: Emacs 26.1 release branch created

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Tue, 19 Sep 2017 19:43:56 +0000
> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden>, address@hidden, address@hidden
> From: Alan Mackenzie <address@hidden>
> 
> A few days ago, somebody on the help list complained that his quotes
> were being messed up in help messages.  Eli answered him by explaining
> about curly quotes, and what Emacs does with ASCII quotes.  That much is
> not in the manual.

That problem was due to a faulty font used by the OP, so it had
absolutely nothing to do with curly quotes per se.  The same problem
would have happened with any other non-ASCII character, the quotes
just served as a "canary".

> My main concern at the moment is my belief that you have been and are
> attempting to maximise the difficulty faced by Emacs users in disabling
> curly quotes.

I don't think many users will want to do that.  Until now, the only
voices I heard are from this list, and people here will not have any
difficulty in using a not-so-documented non-defcustom.

One of important principles in Emacs development should be that we
don't revert our decisions too lightly, unless a decision proves to be
a disaster.  And we are not there yet, not by far.