bug#50959: 28.0.50; Shorthand symbols are unknown to Emacs

[Phil Sainty]

Following up on 
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2021-10/msg00109.html

On 2021-10-02 21:53, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > From: Phil Sainty <psainty@orcon.net.nz>
> > On 2021-10-02 19:45, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > > There's a huge difference between breaking literal searches for
> > > symbols by text-searching tools, and breaking basic Emacs commands
> > > because the name the user sees and types is not known to Emacs.
> >
> > But shorthands does *both* of those things.
> >
> > The name the user sees is "s-foo".
> > The name known to Emacs is "string-library-foo" (or whatever).
> > The user types "C-h o s-foo RET" and Emacs says "no match".
>
> If this is correct (I didn't try), please report it as a bug.


This was indeed the case in the build I'd compiled for testing:

GNU Emacs 28.0.50 of 2021-09-29
Repository revision: b02a7ad2631b6ac3a95e53cb26a0aa1b1ab7e98a
Repository branch: master

I tested with a copy of so-long.el in which I renamed all of the
so-long-* symbols to sl-* and then configured the local variable
;; elisp-shorthands: (("sl-" . "so-long-"))

Loading the new sl.el confirmed that Emacs didn't recognise the
shorthand symbols generally.

(Until now I was under the impression that this was all part and
parcel of the shorthands feature, but it turns out that it's a bug.)


-Phil