Re: Proposal: Forwards-Compatibility Library for Emacs

[João Távora]

On Tue, Sep 21, 2021 at 11:16 PM Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> wrote:
>
> João Távora <joaotavora@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > Right.  And so if this is the goal (and given that I also agree to
> > "start slow"), why not have more :core ELPA packages?
> > Say subr-x.el, as an example.  It has no dependencies.  Why
> > not make it a :core package right now?
>
> If you overwrite the subr-x functions from, say, Emacs 25.1 with the
> ones in Emacs 28, you'll likely end up with an Emacs that doesn't work.

Curious. Which functions in particular are you thinking about? That's
the aforementioned forward-compatibility problem (or backward,
depending on the perspective) that the compat.e library would also
have, right?

> (And we certainly don't want to take on the maintenance burden of
> writing subr-x in such a way that it's backwards-compatible.)

Then the same problem will happen when you copy these functions
into compat.el. Unless you do what Stefan says, and rename them.

João