Re: capitalization of error messages and option descriptions

[Karl Berry]

    I'm quite ambivalent about this rule, often disable it, and
    would not mind removing it altogether.

I gather by "this rule" you mean the syntax-check rule.  I agree
completely.

I doubt rms would agree to removing the original statement from
standards.texi, since it's a user-visible convention.  However, it's
clearly intended to apply only to messages of the form
PROGRAM:SRCFILE:LINENO:COLUMN: MESSAGE

Diagnostic messages of other sorts, like:
  Input files contain messages in different encodings, %s and %s among others.

certainly should be capitalized and have periods.  That is indeed a
sentence :).  (Although, switching topics a bit, I wonder if
users might like to have all such errors cast in the above format so
that next-error would do something sensible with them ... anyway ...)

k