Re: [DEV] Bump Emacs requirement to 24.4?

[Rasmus <rasmus@gmx.us>]

Bastien Guerry <bzg@gnu.org> writes:

> We can also simply revert those change and wait for the decision
> to be taken.  This is a matter of waiting ~10 days I'd say.
>
>> Also, Emacs 24.3 was released in March, 2013.  By the time the next Org is
>> released, it will be more than 3 years old.
>
> Com'on :)
>
> I'm back for good and don't plan to wait years between releases.
> I wish we can release 8.4 at the end of August and 9.0 in October.

It was not meant as 'finger-pointing'.  Slow releases are not necessarily
a bad thing.  Org is very important to the work of some folks, so a slow
cycle might be less disruptive.  OTOH, so could frequent releases...  I
don't know, really.

Achim Gratz <Stromeko@nexgo.de> writes:

> Nicolas Goaziou writes:
>> Just to be sure, can we require Emacs 24.4 for development version
>> (a.k.a. Org 8.4)? As a data point, Debian stable provides it.
>
> Debian Squeeze LTS or whatever they call it doesn't w/o backports.
> RHEL6 doesn't have it w/o epel (RHEL7 has 24.3 IIRC).
> RaspberryPi doesn't have it.

I have Emacs 24.4 on my Debian Wheezy which is pretty old.  Can ELPA serve
different versions based on the client?

> I'm still falling over Emacs 22 in various forms and Emacs 23, where it
> is standard is not always at the latest version (23.4).

If ELPA can (0) be used with Emacs-23 and (1) ELPA is smart enough to
serve the right version of Org, I don't think this is a problem.

>> Also, what is the status of XEmacs support? AFAIU Org 8.3 doesn't build
>> on XEmacs but no one is complaining. We may as well drop it and ignore
>> most of "org-compat.el".
>
> I've been doing a lot of this compat stuff, but I gave up since I
> couldn't get ERT to work on XEmacs.  Org did build (with lots of errors)
> until some point and it was at least superficially usable.  The two
> XEmacs users on this list have never responded to any requests for
> further testing.  So I guess that XEmacs can be considered
> unsupportable.

And THESE are the hidden dependency when targeting older Emacs.  We have
so many org-prefixed functions that have equivalents in cl-lib.

Nicolas Goaziou <mail@nicolasgoaziou.fr> writes:


>> We don't need to complete the whole 8.x series and may jump to 9.0
>> soonish, but for the time being, I suggest you create a 9.0 branch
>> with the 24.3 requirement and changes that cannot go without it.
>>
>> WDYT?
>
> I think it is a mistake. 
>
> Handling two development branches means people testing Org have to
> choose which branch to test. We don't have the manpower to waste testing
> capabilities like that.
>
> I also see no reason to write outdated code (e.g., new libraries without
> lexical binding) and update it later.

I agree strongly with the above.

Rasmus

-- 
Dobbelt-A