Re: new apropos feature in Emacs-22

[Richard M. Stallman]

       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.

    It would be _very_ annoying if that question were asked each time that
    an input could be interpreted as a regexp,

I agree.  What I proposed was to ask this question only in cases like
".emacs file" where users might plausibly think they were keywords;
that is to say, only when period is the only special regexp character.
Those cases would not be very common, so the total annoyance will be
small.

    Also, I believe that if a beginning user uses apropos, it usually is
    because they read some doc somewhere that told them that, for more
    info, they could run a specific apropos command with a specific
    regexp.

It is probably because they read some documentation.  I don't follow
the last part of your sentence.  Anyway, I don't think that makes this
question unuseful.