Re: Most of Elisp lacks lexical-binding: t

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

>> Breakage will be inevitable, indeed, but we can spread the pain over
>> some number of years.
> Fast bandaid removal causes significantly less pain than slow. See:

I don't think the analogy holds.

E.g. one of the main motivations to "spread the pain" is that when
someone bumps into something that breaks because of the new use of
lexical-binding in one context, it may motivate him to proactively fix
the problem in other contexts (where the problem doesn't appear yet but
would appear at one of the next steps in the transition).  So I think
the overall pain is reduced.

This said, I do believe that we could speed this up by making
"development builds" (i.e. builds where emacs-version has 4 elements)
a lot more aggressive wrt to dropping backward compatibility: the
average user relying on normal releases would not be affected, but those
living on the edge would be more often motivated to update the packages
they maintain or use.


        Stefan