Re: Stability of core packages (was: Not easy at all to upgrade :core packages like Eglot)

["Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide" <arne_bab@web.de>]

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João Távora <joaotavora@gmail.com> writes:

> A. The effects of the form (package-install 'eglot) moving from
> Emacs 26,27,28 to Emacs 29 are drastically different.
> That's bad stability.
>
> B. The effects of, say, the form (package-install 'xref) moving
> from Emacs 28 to Emacs 29 are the same.  That's good stability.
>
> What I'd like to know if anyone else thinks, like me, that this is
> a problem.  We can discuss how bad of a problem (I think it's
> moderately serious).

To me any breakage in behavior when updating to a newer version is
serious. I use Emacs for many scenarios, and some of those I only touch
twice a year (when I give a lecture and update slides for it), while
others I might not use for 3 years until I go back into that old Python
package.

Usually when I get in there and someting is broken in my Emacs that I
didn’t see otherwise, that’s very painful, because I’m often under time
pressure (like “the lecture is tomorrow and I just realized I have to
change these slides, but with the new version I’ve been using for half a
year the layout of just exactly these slides is broken and I still have
to make dinner for the family and actually get some sleep afterwards!”).

But there are too many different tasks to actually check them all every
time I update. And I usually don’t choose to do an Emacs update, but
just update when my distro ships the new version.

Emacs has been mostly really good at just working after an update
(except for some rare cases where I used a fringe org-feature or where
electric indent got enabled in org-mode), and to me it is essential that
Emacs with moderate customization (I have around 1900 lines of
custom-set-variables — mostly org-capture-templates, org-latex-classes,
and safe-local-variable-values — and 1000 lines of customization — most
of those via use-package) stays stable and does not become volatile.

To some argumentation why that’s not just my preference but essential:
https://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/04/volatile-software/

Best wishes,
Arne
-- 
Unpolitisch sein
heißt politisch sein,
ohne es zu merken.
draketo.de

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