Re: Proposal: Forwards-Compatibility Library for Emacs

[Philip Kaludercic]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

>> The point here is to not to have any separate namespace, so that you can
>> just can put core packages into ELPA without doing any rewrites.
>> What's the concrete risk here?
>
> I think in practice it's usually not a problem, but I'd be surprised if
> there aren't counter examples.  So for a library that wants to do it in
> a somewhat predictable/systematic way, I think it's much simple to have
> all the definitions in a specific namespace (like `compat28-`), and then
> it's a small matter of have a trivial `compat28.el` library that comes
> with Emacs-28 which has a bunch of `defalias`.

I am not sure how this would help provide forwards compatibility for
older versions? Are you proposing that instead of using
file-name-concat, libraries use compat28-file-name-concat that is
defined in a library for older versions?

My intuition would be that this wouldn't be worth the effort, seeing as
most people would probably hesitate to use such long names.

> The main advantage is that we then don't need to assess the possible
> risks at all, so we're free to think about the things that actually matter.
>
>
>         Stefan

-- 
        Philip Kaludercic