Re: defvaralias

[Luc Teirlinck]

Richard Stallman wrote:

   I think that is cleaner, but it is also an incompatible change.
   I'd rather warn people we will change this after version 22.

But the function is new in 22.1, so if we change this in 23, we have
aberrant behavior for just one single release.  All current
documentation, including the NEWS, describes the behavior as being
what the behavior _would_ be after my patch.  So the current actual
behavior appears to be unintentional.  The change only affects
docstrings, so can not introduce severe bugs.  The change only makes a
difference in cases which should not really occur to begin with (at
least not in the Emacs source code): a variable defined twice, once
with defvar and once with defvaralias.

Not making the small code change would require the documentation
(docstring, Elisp manual and NEWS) to become more complex.  We would
have to document the exceptional case and then warn that it will go
away in Emacs 23.

Sincerely,

Luc.