Re: supporting older versions of emacs (was: Re: bootstrap fails AND how about fixing the byte-compiler?)

[Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>]

Hi, Dan!

On Tue, Jan 15, 2008 at 09:47:30PM -0800, Dan Nicolaescu wrote:
> Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> writes:

>   > Anyhow, it seems the best solution for cc-vars.el right now (after
>   > all, it's got to work with Emacs 2[01] and various flavours of
>   > XEmacs, too), is to change c-constant-symbol into a macro.  

> It's obviously your choice, but is it worth it to still support
> emacs-20? 

Yes, I think so, given how little effort that actually takes.

> 21.1 was released in October 2001. 
> Is the number of people that do not upgrade to emacs-21, but still want
> to use the latest cc-mode significant enough to be worth the trouble?

Upgrading an unfamiliar piece of software is a nightmare of fear,
uncertainty and doubt.  (And Emacs is "unfamiliar" to nearly all its
users in this context.)  Will the new version of the software work?  More
to the point how much work will it take to get it to work, iron out the
niggly little differences, and so on?

I think there will be a lot of Emacs users still on old versions, though
they make very little noise.  I don't think giving them compatibility
headaches is the best way of persuading them to upgrade.

However, this is just my personal opinion.  ;-)

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).