RE: lax matching is not a great default behavior

[Drew Adams]

> > > No, because ignoring accents is just a small part of character
> > > folding.  Please take a look at character-fold.el for the details.
> >
> > Agreed.  And neither is it folding of diacriticals, because there
> > are also ad hoc foldings (e.g., quote marks).  And there will
> > likely be more to come.  It is, in fact, a hodge podge of foldings
> > - pretty much all of the various char foldings provided by Emacs
> > so far, except for letter case.
> 
> Actually, it's not a hodge-podge at all.  Barring any user-level
> customizations, it can be formally defined (and has been defined
> elsewhere) what is and what isn't folded.

Whether it is formally defined or not does not answer the
question about the name to use for Emacs users.

The behavior is a combination of diacritical folding and
some ad hoc foldings.  Do you have a _specific_ name for it,
even one coming from the formal definition?  And if so, is
that name a good one for Emacs users?

AFAICT, "character folding" is as good as we've come up
with, so far - not some specific kind of character folding.
And this is because the behavior is not so straightforward
as just folding diacriticals.

> > Why not leave it off by default, for now?
> 
> "Why not" is not a compelling argument, sorry.  It cannot
> win the "why not" argument in the other direction.

"Why change the default?" is precisely the question Emacs
dev generally asks itself.  That is, why not leave it
unchanged?  It is default change that should be argued
for.  No "compelling" argument for default change should
mean we leave the default alone.

The question should not be "Why not change the default?".

> > > turning it off today means that it will get much less testing,
> > > and therefore bugs related to it...will most probably remain
> > > hidden for who knows how long.
> >
> > I seriously doubt that.  That sounds alarmist, to me.
> 
> This is in fact based on actual experience of testing new 
> features in Emacs, during several pretests of a few major
> releases.

No one is arguing that it will get less testing during
pretest if you turn it on during pretest.  You are turning
things on their head.

The question is about the default for the release, not
whether it should be tested or turned on for pretests.

This has been stated more than once now by more than one
person.  But you keep giving the argument that turning it
on for pretesting is beneficial.  So it is.  So turn it
on for pretesting, to get more feedback, and off for
the release.

We will continue to get feedback after the release even
if it is turned off.  And later (e.g. for the following
release) we can make a better judgment than any that can
be made now or during the pretest for this release.

> > My expectation, if we turn it off by default, is that users will
> > try it, like it, and possibly ask for it to become the default
> > behavior.
> 
> OTOH, if we turn it off by default, users might not even find it or
> know it exists for another 5 years.

Wanna bet? ;-)