Re: Creating a git branch for cond*

[Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>]

Hello, Alfred.

On Thu, Jan 25, 2024 at 11:16:43 -0500, Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:

>    Hello, Richard, Eli, and Emacs.

>    Richard posted some embryonic code for cond* a little over a week ago.

>    To move things forward, I propose creating the git branch
>    feature/condstar, and incorporating the new code into it in
>    lisp/emacs-lisp/condstar.el.  This will enable its development to happen
>    more systematically and rapidly.

>    Does anybody have any objections?

> I hope it goes to master directly, it is a single file that doesn't
> affect anything else.  And _if_ existing code is updated to use cond*
> that will get much more milage.

It does affect other things, in particular, other .el files which are
adapted to use cond*.  If that happens on master, then both cond* and
the conversion need to be perfect before the file can be committed.  On
a branch, things can be a lot less constrained.

What I want to do early on in cond* development is convert
lisp/emacs-lisp/macroexp.el from pcase to cond*.  Currently, pcase.el is
dependent upon macroexp.el and macroexp.el is dependent upon pcase.el.
This leads to an unlovely artifice in the bootstrapping file, loadup.el,
and this has caused me grief in another branch I'm working on.

cond* has no dependency on macroexp.el, so could simply be loaded as the
fourth file, after debug-early.el, byte-run.el, backquote.el.  Having
macroexp.el loaded as the fifth file (rather than the 17th, as it
currently is) would simplify the initial loadup appreciably.

No doubt Eli will have something to say about this idea.  ;-)

> Nothing should really stop development if this lives on master, or a
> branch.

There are advantages to the branch, as well as advantages to having it
on master.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).