Re: Periodical releases

[Eric Schulte]

Carsten Mattner <address@hidden> writes:

> On Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 10:31 AM, Bastien <address@hidden> wrote:
>> 2) I will probably release Org 8.0 before the end of the feature freeze
>>   (say march or april).  Not having it in Emacs 24.1 is not such a big
>>   deal, agreed, but it creates a situation where people often install
>>   Org on top of the one that comes with Emacs, which doesn't feel
>>   optimal and leads to many questions, because of conflicting installs.
>
> Out of curiosity. If I have 24.1 with Org 7.x and to use Org latest
> I put that in ~/.emacs.d/<somewhere>, is there some potential
> ambiguity/conflict/version-clash/mixup going on if I add that
> local dir to the load path? Do I have to use some unknown-to-me
> (prepend-to-load-path path)? I know that Vim has ~/.vim/* first in the
> path list. What's it for Emacs?

The `add-to-list' function will place any new directory at the front of
your load path.  In general adding the new version of Org-mode to your
load path, loading or requiring org, and then calling the `org-reload'
function should be sufficient.  For more information see [1].

However, when an older version of Org-mode (e.g., one shipped with
Emacs) is loaded first it defines all Org-mode variables.  Subsequent
versions of Org-mode will not update the values of these variables as a
defvar of an existing variable does not change its value.  This
frequently leads to buggy behavior.  This point would argue for
migration of Org-mode to ELPA in future releases.

Best -- Eric

Footnotes: 
[1]  http://orgmode.org/worg/org-faq.html#Keeping-current

-- 
Eric Schulte
http://cs.unm.edu/~eschulte/