Re: Using unmaintained plugins

[Joost Kremers <joostkremers@fastmail.fm>]

On Sun, Apr 18 2021, Bithov Vinu wrote:
> My question is, is there any concern over using a plugin that is
> unmaintained? If it was written in something like C, I could rest assured
> that the C standard is not going to change so drastically in the
> foreseeable future that I won't be able to compile it, but I'm lost in this
> regard with Emacs and Emacs Lisp.

Emacs Lisp does change, more so probably than C, but backward compatibility is
always a top priority, so as far as the language itself is concerned, it would
normally take many years before code becomes so stale that it won't compile
anymore.

The bigger concern is the Emacs environment. A package may make assumptions
about the environment it is used in that stop being true at some point. Case in
point, I used to use a plugin for mu4e (an Emacs-based e-mail client) that made
particular assumptions about the way mu4e's main screen was built up. At some
point, the way this was done changed and the plugin stopped working. It still
compiled fine, but it didn't work anymore.

`org-drill` obviously relies on Org mode, which may not be as strict about
backward compatibility as Emacs itself, but its core functionality won't change,
so most Org-based packages should work just fine even if they are a couple of
years old.

But, as you may guess from all the hedging, there are no guarantees.


-- 
Joost Kremers
Life has its moments