Subject: Re: BUG (PS)

From: Karl Fogel <[email-masked]>
Date: 19 Oct 2002 17:01:14 -0500

Loredana Lo Conte <[email-masked]> writes:
> If I substitute the four occurrences of "buffer-substring" with
> "buffer-substring-no-properties" in gene-phylo-parse it seems to
> work properly.
> 
> Am I right? If yes, why changing the meaning of a function in between
> emacs releases? This breaks code by definition :)

Wow!  I'm guessing you are right - nice work!  

I've encountered this same problem in lots of other old Elisp.  And if
you do this in the Emacs source tree

   find . -name "*ChangeLog*" | xargs grep buffer-substring

...you'll see that Emacs itself has had to make the exact same fix in
many, many places :-).

(They don't always make completely compatible changes.  They try hard
to, but they allow themselves to break compatibility sometimes.)

> I haven't committed yet, should I?

If this change fixes the problem, and it doesn't seem to be making
any new problems, I'd say commit it.  (I haven't looked at the code
carefully enough to really vouch for the change, so I'm operating
more at the level of rumor here :-) ).

-Karl

---

From: Loredana Lo Conte <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 20 Oct 2002 15:48:13 +0100 (BST)

There are several other "buffer-substring" calls in Ale code, likely to
cause some sort of problem soon or later.

What should I do? I am tempted to change all of them to
"buffer-substring-no-properties", but it would be reassuring if someone
who knows old and new elisp and ale better than I tells me what one does
in such cases.

Loredana

---

From: Karl Fogel <[email-masked]>
Date: 20 Oct 2002 14:38:45 -0500

> who knows old and new elisp and ale better than I tells me what one does

I think it best not to perturb them until they cause a problem.  Or at
least, inspect them first and see whether or not the properties ought
to be included with the string.

Btw, the repository is up again.  I wish I knew why the wedges keep
happening, but we haven't been able to debug it yet.  Oh, for 24 more
hours in a day...