Re: Readings for an emacs package maintainer ?

[Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Jun 1, 2009 at 8:56 PM, Reiner Steib <reinersteib+gmane@imap.cc> wrote:
>> There are other tips in the Elisp manual, node Coding
>> Conventions. These, for instance:
>>
>>  If a package needs to define an alias or a new function for
>>  compatibility with some other version of Emacs, name it with the
>>  package prefix, not with the raw name with which it occurs in the
>>  other version.  Here is an example from Gnus, which provides many
>>  examples of such compatibility issues.
>>
>>   (defalias 'gnus-point-at-bol
>>     (if (fboundp 'point-at-bol)
>>         'point-at-bol
>>       'line-beginning-position))
>>
>>  Redefining or advising an Emacs primitive is a bad idea.  It may do
>>  the right thing for a particular program, but there is no telling
>>  what other programs might break as a result.
>
> It's funny that I pointed Xavier to this very node in March 2008 when
> reporting such a bug in color-theme (see https://gna.org/bugs/?9494)
> which overwrites `replace-in-string' in an incompatible way which
> breaks Gnus, Muse, emacs-jabber, etc.  Unfortunately Xavier didn't fix
> this up to now, AFAIK.


Ah, I wondered why a lot of things stopped working when I tested
color-themes. (This is very troublesome with something like mumamo
since debugging fontification errors is hard and time consuming.)