I'm quite ambivalent about this rule, often disable it, and
would not mind removing it altogether.
I gather by "this rule" you mean the syntax-check rule. I agree
completely.
I doubt rms would agree to removing the original statement from
standards.texi, since it's a user-visible convention. However, it's
clearly intended to apply only to messages of the form
PROGRAM:SRCFILE:LINENO:COLUMN: MESSAGE
Diagnostic messages of other sorts, like:
Input files contain messages in different encodings, %s and %s among others.
certainly should be capitalized and have periods. That is indeed a
sentence :). (Although, switching topics a bit, I wonder if
users might like to have all such errors cast in the above format so
that next-error would do something sensible with them ... anyway ...)
k
