Re: completion.el users?

[Christopher Schmidt <christopher@ch.ristopher.com>]

"Drew Adams" <drew.adams@oracle.com> writes:

Hi Drew,

thanks for your massive answer.  I get your argumentation and all the
points you raised.  I do not exactly agree.

> Or just because it supposedly is "not exactly used any more" - which
> is not demonstrated.  Just googling "dynamic-completion-mode" gives
> 50K+ hits, some (other than this thread) as recent as 5 days ago.

There are 80 hits.  Try to go past page eight.

    https://www.google.com/search?q=%22dynamic-completion-mode%22

I went through the result - it does not indicate much usage of
dynamic-completion-mode.

> No, like your GIT search, that is admittedly _not_ a good indicator of
> the use of completion.el.

Why is that?  Considering the massive amount of Emacs configurations
hosted over at github, the ratio of occurrences of auto-complete-mode
vs. dynamic-completion-mode is pretty representative.

> What is the real impetus for wanting to deprecate completion.el now?

Who is responsible for the code?  Who steps up to fix bugs?  Who is
willing to document the feature?[1]

No one is.  Considering the state of GNU Emacs development, most likely
no one ever will.

Why promote usage of dynamic-completion-mode although there are other
free packages such as auto-complete-mode or predictive-mode[2] which are
superior to dynamic-completion-mode?

> That the "last non-cosmetic patch for it was made in 2007" is not a
> strike against it, IMHO.  Not at all.  And all the less so if that is
> reinforced with the "argument" that that "seems surprisingly long for
> a 90KB file."
>
> Completion.el has been in use for a long time.

Ultimately people moved on to other packages.

Why should the dev team keep the cruft?

How about moving the code to a special GNU ELPA branch - the GNU ELPAM
(Emacs Lisp Package Archaeological Museum)?  Move it back to the GNU
ELPA if someone steps up to maintain it...

        Christopher

[1] dynamic-completion-mode is not mentioned in the manual.  The wiki
does not mention it either.  This makes it an implementation detail of
GNU Emacs to me.

[2] http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/PredictiveMode