bug#67061: [PATCH] Improve syntax highlighting for python-ts-mode

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 13/12/2023 23:16, Stefan Kangas wrote:
> Dmitry Gutov <dmitry@gutov.dev> writes:
>
> > I don't know at what stage we're going to start worrying when adding new
> > elements to the queries, though, in fear of breaking compatibility with
> > some potential older version of the grammar.
>
> Right.  But can we really stop installing support for new language
> features that users expect?

Some less important ones -- maybe. E.g. syntax highlighting is less 
essential than indentation. Though it's usually easier to implement 
(with tree-sitter, at least).

> I'm not super close to the tree-sitter stuff to be honest, so apologies
> if I misunderstood something.  But IIUC, the current situation means
> that we can't depend on concrete versions of grammars, which means we
> can't depend on that to make adaptions.  But that situation is not
> really caused by us, right?

We made our choices here too:

- Trying to support different versions of grammars, not just the latest 
ones. Or a "pinned" revision.
- Adding treesit modes to the core, rather than publishing them to ELPA.

> So maybe at the point when we find problems in practice, we should just
> throw up our hands and urge users to upgrade.  Perhaps it'll encourage
> more work on improving the situation with grammar versioning.

Simply asking our users to upgrade to the latest grammar won't work if 
the major mode they are using is only compatible with some older grammar 
version. And it's not upgradable because the major mode is not in ELPA.

We might solve this in the future with a two-step: "throwing up our 
hands" and publishing major modes to "ELPA core". treesit.el will 
probably need to stabilize a bit more before that, though.