Re: Someone start maintaining luddites.el

[Yuan Fu]

> On Dec 28, 2021, at 10:13 PM, Po Lu <luangruo@yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> Fu Yuan <casouri@gmail.com> writes:
> 
>> It shouldn’t be hard to allow users to choose a release they want to
>> stick to, no? For a starter we can have Emacs 28 when 29 releases. And
>> with each following release we can add the previous release to
>> possible fallback list.
>> 
>> Providing fall back for releases prior to 28 might not be very useful,
>> as users who want to old behavior must already have the configuration
>> written in their init file.
> 
> I expect future versions of Emacs to behave generally the same way as
> Emacs 23 or 27, so that I do not get lost trying to use it, but I don't
> want to remember how Emacs 28 (or 29, or 30, or 31) behaved so I can
> pick a version whose behaviour it should emulate, if that behaviour is
> even enumerable.

Probably only variable and faces are emulated, when possible. And I don’t 
understand why you need to remember anything to use such a mode: it removes 
changes. If anything, it should only allow you not need to remember things.

> 
> Such a compatibility layer will probably have to be constantly updated
> as well to fit with changes in later versions of Emacs.

That’s not much work, the changes to default values of variables and faces are 
not that much in each release. And we only need record the change in each 
release, reverting to defaults of prior releases only need to concatenate the 
change in each release together.

> The solution is simply to not change the default values of options when
> it is not due, and to change them when it is, forgoing any of the
> "compatibility layer" nonsense.

First, that solution is not very good: people have different opinions of when 
default values are due. Second, this “compatibility layer” is just a feature, 
it doesn’t change any default behavior, I don’t know why that could be bad (I 
assume that you think it is bad). Third, I don’t think adding this feature will 
make Emacs change default values when they are not due. If anything, the mode 
only helps people who don’t want Emacs to change: instead of adding code to 
.emacs, now you only need to turn this mode on.

Yuan