bug#57412: Could we make linum.el obsolete?

[Stefan Monnier via "Bug reports for GNU Emacs, the Swiss army knife of text editors" <bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>]

Colin Baxter [2022-08-26 20:00:40] wrote:
> Yes, I understand that and agree. From my perspective, I am disappointed
> that candidates for obsolescence seem to be chosen from libraries that
> are useful and not from morse, zone and the like.

Those that are useful but suffer from corner-case problems due to the
underlying design are bound to fall into this trap: if they weren't
very useful, noone would bother to reimplement them to fix those
corner cases but since the problems stem from the underlying approach,
the fix requires a significant rewrite which inevitably leads to
a slightly different featureset.

The purpose of obsoleting a library like `nlinum.el` is to help/encourage
people to move to the better options out there (and sometimes also to
discover important use-cases not yet covered by the new code).

The maintenance cost of `nlinum.el` isn't very high, but there's a cost
for users of having to choose between various options, none of which is
a strict superset of the other.


        Stefan