Re: Resources for an old newbie ?

[Philip Kaludercic <philipk@posteo.net>]

Emanuel Berg <incal@dataswamp.org> writes:

> Michael Heerdegen wrote:
>
>> And the second tip just adds even more barriers at this
>> beginner level. It might be fun and exciting to use the
>> newest sources, but this is definitely not related to
>> learning Emacs - it's distracting and unnecessary unless you
>> are very excited and have a lot of time. One can do this
>> later or. It's not good to advice people to do this -
>> especially beginners.
>
> People tend to care about 1-3 programs, if one of those are
> Emacs then I think one should get the newest version
> and source, definitely. It isn't difficult, actually.
>
> Because, the problem is the repositories are so behind.
> For example in the Debian repos, xemacs21 is the most "recent"
> version available ...

That is a bad example: XEmacs 21(.4) /is/ the newest version of XEmacs,
since there hasn't been a release since 2009[0].  It appears there was
a beta release just a few days ago[1], after a almost ten-year break.

Depending on what you do, I think that even a release from Debian Stable
is good enough for most people who aren't into core Emacs development.
The main issue most people will eventually encounter is that some
package maintainers are too eager to drop support for "older" versions
of Emacs, so a number of interesting packages become inaccessible.  But
Debian Stable is usually what defines the fringe of "widespread Emacs
releases", so package maintainers usually respect that.

That being said, it does hurt to know that the next release of Emacs
will miss the next Debian release ever so closely, meaning that Stable
users will be stuck with Emacs 28 instead of 29 for a few more years to
come.

[0] https://www.xemacs.org/Releases/index.html#Stable
[1] https://www.xemacs.org/Releases/21.5.35.html#announcement