Re: please consider keeping defadvice around

[Madhu <enometh@meer.net>]

*  Adam Porter <adam@alphapapa.net> <3750971b-2947-65a4-b25f-d3a95a9c9c30@alphapapa.net>
Wrote on Sun, 10 Sep 2023 03:46:54 -0500

>> * commit 27ed565ec6163c499191b62a4cee10d99019aa38
>> | Author:     Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>
>> | AuthorDate: Thu Aug 3 23:41:11 2023 -0400
>> | Commit:     Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>
>> | CommitDate: Thu Aug 3 23:41:11 2023 -0400
>> |
>> |    * lisp/emacs-lisp/advice.el (defadvice): Mark as obsolete
>> defadvice is a carefully designed and well documented piece of
>> software.  It provides a very useful abstraction on how to define
>> advice and provides easy hooks to disable specific advice, unadvise
>> and redefine advices.  At the least this is essential porcelein which
>> has to be reimplemente on top of the add-function add-advice plumbing.
>> I can see no good reason to deprecate and remove defadvice which is
>> valuble for both its design and beautiful documentation.  Removal
>> would only force the user to use the new sparesly-documented
>> interfaces to produce write-only opaque unnamed-closure-based
>> undebuggable code.
>
> What about DEFINE-ADVICE?  It seems to imitate the old DEFADVICE but
> using the new nadvice library.

DEFADVICE also uses the new framework.

All my concerns above stand.  The claim that it is "simpler" is
specious and does injustice to the earlier design and is
propaganada. The documentation of the new defadvice again defers to
the implementation details, does not provide the abstratcions that
were provided the difference in the quality of the documentation is
apparent.

> As well, the shortcomings of the old advice library, and
> improvements of the new nadvice library, are documented in the Elisp
> manual.  It seems like a worthy replacement.

The nadvice is freely available to use.  I see the obsoleting the old
mechanism is a move to destroy value and invalidate a valid design,
presumable based on personal prejudice.