bug#9899: 24.0.90; change in menu item representation

[Drew Adams]

Apparently, in Emacs 23, you changed the cached representation of menu
items.  Scanning the C code in keymap.c and keyboard.c suggests that the
caching of the key sequence is no longer done, and if already done
somewhere else is ignored (skipped over).
 
And yet, as late as Emacs 23.3, this remains in the doc (elisp) Extended
Menu Items:
 
"When an equivalent keyboard key binding is cached, the extended menu
item binding looks like this:
 
(menu-item ITEM-NAME REAL-BINDING (KEY-BINDING-DATA)
    . ITEM-PROPERTY-LIST)"
 
That text was removed for Emacs 24, but AFAICT it was already untrue for
Emacs 23 and should have been removed then.  There was no such caching
even in 23 AFAICT - no (KEY-BINDING-DATA).  That's what I see in the
debugger.
 
Obviously, this change breaks 3rd party/user code that takes advantage
of (KEY-BINDING-DATA).
 
The bug I'm reporting is to ask you to at least mention this change in
NEWS, or if possible in NEWS.23.  I also tried to find some mention of
this change in emacs-devel@gnu.org, but I couldn't find any mention, let
alone a proposal and discussion.  Admittedly, it was hard to search for
this, so I might have overlooked a thread about it.
 
This change is unfortunate, as it means that any code that wants to use
the already determined key representation must take the time needed to
look up the key afresh.  For menu-navigation code such as lacarte.el,
for instance, the key is included as part of the menu-item text
available for completion, and this change means taking extra time, for
each menu item, to look up a possible key binding.
 
Why do you keep moving stuff to C, instead of moving C stuff to Lisp?
Emacs should be as transparent and modifiable via Lisp as possible.
That's part of its being "the extensible editor".  You seem to be
working against that spirit, which is the heart of Emacs.  Why?
 
In GNU Emacs 24.0.90.1 (i386-mingw-nt5.1.2600) of 2011-10-24 on MARVIN
 Windowing system distributor `Microsoft Corp.', version 5.1.2600
 configured using `configure --with-gcc (4.6) --no-opt --cflags
 -I"D:/devel/emacs/libs/libXpm-3.5.8/include"
 -I"D:/devel/emacs/libs/libXpm-3.5.8/src"
 -I"D:/devel/emacs/libs/libpng-dev_1.4.3-1/include"
 -I"D:/devel/emacs/libs/zlib-dev_1.2.5-2/include"
 -I"D:/devel/emacs/libs/giflib-4.1.4-1/include"
 -I"D:/devel/emacs/libs/jpeg-6b-4/include"
 -I"D:/devel/emacs/libs/tiff-3.8.2-1/include"
 -I"D:/devel/emacs/libs/gnutls-2.10.1/include" --ldflags
 -L"D:/devel/emacs/libs/gnutls-2.10.1/lib"'