Re: Undocumented hyperlinks in doc strings.

[Richard Stallman]

    In as far as the first one goes, one could replace the occurrences of
    [ \t\n]+ and [ \t\n]* (the latter probably would have to be changed to
    [ \t\n]+ anyway, for consistency) in my patch by [ \n].  (If one does
    not allow multiple spaces, it seems consistent not to allow tab
    either.)  That would mean that the author would have to be careful
    about "space related sloppiness" like trailing whitespace or an
    inadvertent inappropriate double space inside a sentence.

That is true.  I am not sure which approach would actually do a better job
in practice.

    Just in case, what about a convention to follow ;;; by a single space
    if one wants the line two be considered a "heading line" by
    outline-minor-mode and by at least two spaces if one wants it to be
    considered a "body line".

That might work.  If you use M-x comment-region on code within a
function, there will normally be at least three spaces after the
semicolons.  However, if you use M-x comment-region to comment out
top-level code, there may sometimes be just one space.  Still, making
outlines use this convention might be a good improvement in outline
processing on Lisp files.

(I think that outline processing on Lisp files is a rather obscure
issue.)