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Re: Using unmaintained plugins


From: phillip . lord
Subject: Re: Using unmaintained plugins
Date: Sun, 18 Apr 2021 19:23:04 +0100
User-agent: Roundcube Webmail/1.4.11


org-drill is erratically maintained I think rather than unmaintained: I used it fairly intensely for a period, now I don't need it as much and it's rather fallen down my todo list.

Mostly Emacs packages will work for a fairly long time, even without maintenance -- some of my packages have not been updated in a decade, because they still work. The main issue with org-drill specifically is that it depends on org-mode and that does perhaps change a bit more frequently.

Some Emacs packages do eventually fade away into the ether and that's always a risk. Not sure whether it will happen with org-drill of course. No one else has stepped up to take the maintainership and I may or may not get around to it.

On 2021-04-18 10:35, Bithov Vinu wrote:
Hi,

I recently began to use Emacs org-drill (see:
https://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/org-drill.html) in Emacs which is an
unmaintained Emacs package for scheduling and reviewing flashcards
using a spaced
repetition <https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-repetition> algorithm. There is a link on the aforementioned URL that goes to another gitlab url which hasn't been updated in over a year, so I found a legacy version (one of the last
versions written by Paul Sexton, the original author, before it being
handed over to Phil Lord). Phil Lord's version is the currently
unmaintained version on gitlab, I just found the "org-drill" module and
it's requirement (org-learn.el) through some digging. There are some other plugins that do the same thing as org-drill (pamparam, org-fc come to mind)
but none of these are as slick and efficient (in terms of creating and
reviewing cards) as org-drill.

My question is, is there any concern over using a plugin that is
unmaintained? If it was written in something like C, I could rest assured
that the C standard is not going to change so drastically in the
foreseeable future that I won't be able to compile it, but I'm lost in this regard with Emacs and Emacs Lisp. Obviously, Emacs isn't going away anytime
soon, but should I have concerns
 that a change in Emacs Lisp cripples org-drill (or any other plugins I
use)? Should I be worried about a dependency of org-drill becoming
unmaintained or losing support in a newer version of Emacs? Org-drill is
pretty much a completed project (it's a flashcard plugin, so security
patches/updates aren't really necessary) because it seems to be a
write-once-and-forget-about-it thing, but I just wanted to be sure.

Thanks,
~~~



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