Re: [Emacs-diffs] emacs-25 f8208b6: Document the user-level features of the Xref package

[Stephen Leake]

Dmitry Gutov <address@hidden> writes:

> On 01/21/2016 10:19 PM, Stephen Leake wrote:
>
>> xref-find-apropos
>>
>>      This is just a search, not relying on any "cross reference"
>>      information.
>>
>>      project-find-* provides the same functionality, so xref-find-apropos
>>      can be removed (assuming every xref backend provides a project
>>      backend).
>
> No, "apropos" lists the *definitions* matching a regexp. You won't get
> that by simply using regexp-search.

The doc string says:

    Find all meaningful symbols that match PATTERN.
    The argument has the same meaning as in ‘apropos’.

I read that as "all occurances of the regexp"; I don't know what
"meaningful" is supposed to mean here.

If it is supposed to find only definitions, the doc string should say
so:

    Find the definitions of all symbols that match PATTERN.
    PATTERN has the same meaning as in `apropos'.

However, the etags implementation uses re-search-forward to find PATTERN
in the tags files; that won't handle word lists as `apropos' does. So
does that need to be fixed, or should we change the doc string further
to say:

    Find the definitions of all symbols that match PATTERN (a regexp).

-- 
-- Stephe