Re: new apropos feature in Emacs-22

[Richard M. Stallman]

    I believe that (emacs)Apropos should _explicitly_ warn that, if one
    wants to search by keywords, keywords should not contain regexp special
    characters and warn in particular that filenames containing dots can
    normally not be used as keywords.

I will do that.

                                       As people will sometimes _want_ to
    use things like .emacs, .mailrc or .XDefaults as keywords, especially
    for apropos-documentation, some escape convention should be provided.
    Why not use my original proposal: final unquoted `[' (or final single
    `\') is ignored and means that the input is unconditionally a list of
    keywords, for this specialized (but real) need?

I don't think this will be very useful, because the people it is most
aimed at are beginners and they are unlikely to remember that this
is available.

The only think I can think of that would help beginners with such
inputs would be to detect such cases and ask the user "Did you mean
this as a regexp or as a list of keywords?"  That question would
help people without requiring them to remember in advance that the
two options exist.

I have not looked at the program callers of the apropos commands.
If this is likely to break them, maybe we should not do it.
Otherwise, would you like to do it?