Re: Post-22.1 development?

[Jeremy Maitin-Shepard]

David Kastrup <address@hidden> writes:

[snip]

> With that kind of change, we might equally well _remove_
> process-environment altogether in favor of some other accessor
> functions.  The effect will be the same: pretty much _everything_
> looking at process-environment will break.

> It might be an API of choice in the long run.  In the mean time, the
> shared tail _implementation_ provides a migration strategy.  We can
> (once we find ourselves converging to a preferred behavior) introduce
> accessor functions at some point of time, and then start deprecating
> process-environment.  But that's a long haul.

It seems that it would be useful to provide very soon accessor functions
or macros for performing all environment-related operations that allow
for the desired genericity in implementation choice.  That way, at least
new code can use the accessors, and not need fixing later.  Furthermore,
by adding these accessors to Emacs 22 (but not necessarily changing any
code in Emacs 22 to use them), packages can remain to be compatible with
Emacs 22.

Once this is done, maintaining backwards compatibility becomes less of a
concern, and the need for an implementation hack is lessened.

-- 
Jeremy Maitin-Shepard