; rcirc-update-activity-string: Justify some existing behaviour

(cherry picked from commit d68e6d2689d0b3be4d251b0edc09fba144f7b282)

diff --git a/lisp/net/rcirc.el b/lisp/net/rcirc.el
index 35a14f7f93b5d032204c8dc7b604a1fe91d87c87..5d7e798fce597db63f18d0c7f2d1558b7bec3cb9 100644 (file)
--- a/lisp/net/rcirc.el
+++ b/lisp/net/rcirc.el
@@ -2525,6 +2525,17 @@ activity.  Only run if the buffer is not visible and
                 ;; any IRC connections.  Otherwise, whether we display
                 ;; "[]" or not depends on whether or not this function
                 ;; happens to have been called in this session yet.
+                ;;
+                ;; Consistently display nothing, rather than
+                ;; consistently displaying "[]", for the sake of the
+                ;; following sort of case: the user has enabled
+                ;; `rcirc-track-minor-mode' using the customization
+                ;; system, but also starts up Emacs instances that
+                ;; aren't used for IRC.  Due to the use of easy
+                ;; customization, `rcirc-track-minor-mode' will be
+                ;; turned on for every instance of Emacs.  But we don't
+                ;; want to take up valuable mode line space when, say,
+                ;; Emacs is started up as the value of EDITOR/VISUAL.
                 ((not (null (rcirc-process-list)))
                  "[]")
                 (t