Emacspeak discussion list

["T.V Raman" <raman AT google.com>]

It's great to see some  of you stepping up to actively understand the
code base in the process of helping someone with a problem --- this is
in my opinion the best way to learn by doing.
A couple of additional tips below on avoiding rat-holes to get lost in:

1. In addition to looking at the code, dont forget the basic "Verify the
   issue by reproing it".
2. Now that some of you have looked at  parts of the code, variable
   naming is significant --- names starting with ems- and ems-- are
   internal variables and setting them by hand is a solution of last resort.
3. If something is not declared as a defcustom, there is likely a good
   reason why -- see what Parham discovered when he initially asserted
   that "things were not user friendly" because dtk-set-rate was not a
   defcustom. That also helped him identify a long-standing bug in 
mac-voices.el.
4. Always ask someone who reports an issue details re  various versions
   of what they are running; it may not be what you assume or what you
   yourself are running. Of course that is the  responsibility of
   someone asking the question  --- but lurkers who only  participate
   when they have a problem are also fundamentally lazy in this regard.
5. Left as an exercise -- if  you're running something current -- ie
   released version -- the prompt that the original author of this
   thread complained about also has the solution in it --  so though
   this thread has been educational, none of it was necessary in reality.
6 Tip: Robert, as the one who picked up on the internal var to set by
   looking at the code, you were also looking at the real answer right
   on that line, can you spot it?

   
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