comparison admin/notes/documentation @ 100030:374fce6afcea

Add notes about Antinews.

100029:87de075a1ad3

"This does not move point".  If you come across passive verbs in Emacs
documentation or comments, please see if it is possible to make the
text shorter and clearer using the active voice.  Usually that does
make an improvement.  The explicit subject required by the active voice
often provides important information which makes the text clearer, too.

100030:374fce6afcea

"This does not move point".  If you come across passive verbs in Emacs
documentation or comments, please see if it is possible to make the
text shorter and clearer using the active voice.  Usually that does
make an improvement.  The explicit subject required by the active voice
often provides important information which makes the text clearer, too.


** Antinews nodes

*** Why Antinews is useful

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2008-11/msg00893.html

The usefulness of Antinews is to help people who buy the printed
manual and are still using the previous Emacs version.  That's why we
focus on the (eliminated) behavior of the old version rather than on
the new features.

Of course, we try to make it amusing as well.

*** Don't mention in Antinews too many features absent in old versions

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2008-11/msg01054.html

Since the purpose of Antinews is to help people use the previous Emacs
version, there is usually no need to mention features that are simply
absent in that version.  That situation will be clear enough to users
without help from the manual.

For instance, this

    @item
    Emacs can no longer be started as a daemon.  We decided that having an
    Emacs sitting silently in the background with no visual manifestation
    anywhere in sight is too confusing.

may not need mentioning, because --daemon will give an error message
saying it's not implemented, and other cases aren't affected.

The kind of change for which the user really needs help from Antinews
is where a feature works _differently_ in the previous version.
In those cases, the user might have trouble figuring out how to use
the old version without some sort of help.