[21.2] kill-rectangle and kill-* in read-only buffer

It may be controversial so I'm sending to here. Most of the function which does kill-region or something and has name of kill-* has `*' in its interactive spec. So, It signals an error before executing function body. However, kill-rectangle and kill-region is designed to work in read-only buffer and I'd like to use it even in read-only buffer. What confuses me is the fact that comments and the code in the source says different thing. For example, in rect.el, (defun kill-rectangle (start end &optional fill) [...] (interactive "*r\nP") [...] ;; ### NOTE: this is actually the only function that needs to do complicated ;; stuff like what's happening in `operate-on-rectangle', because the buffer ;; might be read-only. --dv (defun extract-rectangle-line (startcol endcol lines) kill-paragraph, kill-sentence, kill-primary-selection, backward-or-forward-kill-word, backward-or-forward-kill-sentence, backward-or-forward-kill-sentence, zap-to-char, kill-line, kill-comment, kill-word, backward-kill-word are the list of functions which have `*' spec. Some of the are clearly marked with `;; XEmacs modified' or `; XEmacs' but there's no entry in the ChangeLog and no hit in xemacs-beta archive search. My question is, is it OK to change them to be executed in a read-only buffer? I sometimes use kill-rectangle in read-only buffer and think it as useful. The patch is attached. -- Yoshiki Hayashi