Smooth transition for modules (was: [POLL] Should Org tempo be enabled by default? (expand templates thru e.g. "<s[TAB]"))

[Bastien <bzg@gnu.org>]

Hi Aaron,

Aaron Ecay <aaronecay@gmail.com> writes:

> OK, thatʼs good to know.  Iʼve held off on any pushing of the patch to
> master until everything is worked out.  In the meantime, Iʼve put it in
> a branch “org-tempo”.

thanks for this.

> I also added a second commit to that branch which implements my vision
> of the upgrade path (deprecation warnings, etc.)  For convenience, that
> patch is also attached to this email.

Thanks -- I tested it.  I like the idea of sending a warning to the
user for backward-incompatible changes but in this case, well, we take
for granted that org-tempo will be turned off by default in the next
release... but this is not decided yet.

To be clear, the whole change still needs work for sure, and nothing
is decided so far.

But here is some food for thought on how to deprecate an Org feature
more nicely.

We have org-modules, which is an internal mechanism to load default
Org modules.  Yes, this predates Emacs package system, and yes, we
should question the usefulness of it now (I do).

But: what if we could use org-modules (or a similar mechanism) to tell
the user: "Hey! We, the AlMighty Developers of Org think this feature
is better not to be loaded by default for *every* user - but you, the
independant rebel, might think otherwise, so here is your chance to
turn it on by default in your configuration.  Proceed (y/n)?"  And
voilà!

For example, the default value of org-modules could be an alist like:

'((org-bbdb . t)
  (org-eww  . t)
  (org-tempo . 'confirm)

Then on first load, traverse this alist and prompt for confirmation
for packages marked 'confirm.

What do you think?

-- 
 Bastien