Re: Bug: Org mode fails to compile using Emacs 24.5-r10 [9.4.5 (9.4.5-g3ea248 @ /home/yantar92/.emacs.d/straight/build/org/)]

[Tim Cross]

Timothy <tecosaur@gmail.com> writes:

> Colin Baxter <m43cap@yandex.com> writes:
>
>> Debian 9.13 may be old but updates are still made available. While
>> Debian supports the os-version and therefore by implication emacs-24, I
>> feel org-mode shouldn't deliberately break that support.
>
> I have to admit, I'm not sure why Org support should stretch so far
> back. If it was a standalone thing, I could see it, but as it's
> vendored with Emacs I'm not sure why we don't just do stable Emacs - 1
> (i.e. 26.3 ATM).

I don't think we can set an absolute limit. It really depends on what
has changed in Emacs. For example, if Emacs adds some feature or
capability which really improves org performance, we might decide to
drop older versions sooner to try and get everyone onto a more
performant version. On the other hand, if new versions of Emacs don't
really add any significantly beneficial changes, we might continue to
support older versions for longer. We also need to consider changes in
the Emacs release cycle. In recent years, this seems to have been faster
than it use to be. Emacs 24.5 was released in April 2015, which is only
6 years ago. Emacs 25.3 was less than 4 years ago.

People do tend to upgrade their hardware every 3 - 5 years and it can
take distributions 2+ years to update the version they are shipping, so
in general, we probably do need to support major versions for up to 5 or
so years after release. However, this also needs to consider the adding
of lexical binding as a significant enhancement. The next 'big one' is
likely to be native compilation support for *.el files.

I do think it is probably time to drop support for Emacs 24 in the next
major release. However, we cannot drop it 'mid release'.


-- 
Tim Cross