Re: Help sought understanding shorthands wrt modules/packages

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
> Cc: akrl@sdf.org, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Mon, 07 Nov 2022 02:47:34 -0500
> 
>   > > That is unreasonable.  People have been installing very large changes
>   > > just lately.
> 
>   > No, they haven't, not lately anyway.
> 
> I think package-vc was just installed in master this weekend

package-vc is a new Lisp package with a small number of new commands
which provide new functionality.  The package doesn't touch any
internals, and thus cannot have any effect on any commands other than
those it adds.  And the discussion of merging this package's branch
started more than a month ago.  (The branch itself is much older.)

> and noverlays a few days ago.

The decision to install noverlays was made in September, and since
then Stefan, Gerd, Matt, and others worked on putting the final polish
on it.  The branch itself was reviewed and discussed long ago.

>   > It is a minor feature, indeed, but its effect on low-level code is
>   > quite significant and could potentially destabilize Emacs.
> 
> It adds a feature that nothing in Emacs actually uses.
> It is potentially significant, but it won't affect anything
> if you don't use it.  I think you have exaggerated a .01 into .99.

I don't think I exaggerated.  Here's the list of the aspects of the
patch which I think make it incomplete and potentially risky:

  . it changes oblookup_considering_shorthand in fundamental ways,
    which affects all of its callers, notably intern and unintern;
  . it includes unresolved issues: how to handle this with
    natively-compiled code and with modules (I personally don't yet
    have a clear idea whether and how to do any of these two);
  . it affects file handlers: they will need to support the new
    feature (and such a support is not yet in the patch, so it will
    have to be written and tested);
  . there's no lispref documentation for this

Finally, there's nothing important enough in this feature that we
should hurry with installing it.

It will take time to figure out the aspects we didn't and complete the
implementation and the docs.  Given the short time till branching, I
don't see how we could make it, and I definitely don't see why we
should hurry.  Why is it a problem to have it on master starting one
month from now?

> Basically, you haven't convinced me that there is a basis for this
> conclusion.

Given the above, I think it's the other way around: you should
convince me.