Re: Do we need gnus-yes-or-no-p and gnus-y-or-n-p?

[Katsumi Yamaoka <yamaoka@jpl.org>]

>>>>> Reiner Steib wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 06 2008, Katsumi Yamaoka wrote:
>> `y-or-n-p' leaves the question and the answer in the echo area
>> is not intentional.

> Maybe, maybe not.

Maybe no one can answer that it is intentional or not.

> I could imagine that it is intentional: In contrast
> to yes-or-no-p it is much easier to type y, n, SPC, DEL, etc
> accidentally, so it might be useful for the user to see what he has
> typed.

I admit that there is some truth in what you wrote.

> Do you or anyone have real life examples (in Gnus) where leaving the
> message in the echo area after `(gnus-)y-or-n-p' is confusing?

Maybe it's a matter of a sense of beauty.  You don't mind it, but
I do.  And Lars might have felt it like me, too.  Here is a
ChangeLog entry for ding Gnus v0.29[1]:

Tue Feb 28 00:25:04 1995  Lars Ingebrigtsen  <lars (at) eyesore.no>
[...]
	* gnus.el: All y-or-n-p's and yes-or-no-p's delete their messages
	from the echo area.

(At that time, the latest released version of Emacs was 19.28.
 IIRC, there is no difference in the behavior of `y-or-n-p'
 between 19.28 and the recent ones.  Although I believe
 `gnus-yes-or-no-p' was useless even then.)

>> If anything, we may call it a bug.

> If so, it would be a general bug in (X)Emacs and should be fixed
> there, not in Gnus, IMHO.

But if it's a bug and even if it is fixed, we still have to support
old Emacsen.

> Would you like to ask if it's intentional on emacs-devel/xemacs-beta?

Yes, I'll do it.

[1] You can find it in:
    ftp://ftp.gnus.org/pub/gnus/old/dgnus-0.30.tar.gz