Re: [PATCH] Fix window width when line numbers present

[Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com>]

Bastien <bzg@gnu.org> writes:

> Hi Ihor,
>
> Ihor Radchenko <yantar92@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> The text is mostly clear. However, there is a slight confusion about
>> actual current Emacs version vs. planned Emacs version.
>
> I've rephrased it a bit to focus on "releases", not "versions":
>
>   We aim at keeping the latest stable version of Org compatible with
>   the *last three major releases of Emacs*.
>
>   For example, if the latest release of Emacs is 28.x, then you can
>   assume that the latest release of Org is compatible with Emacs 28.x,
>   27.x and 26.x, but not with Emacs 25.x.
>
>> Should we target "current" Emacs 28 for main? Should we target Emacs
>> version+1 as current on main all the time or maybe just when new
>> Emacs release branch is created, but not yet released? It is not
>> fully clear.
>
> These paragraphes on Worg try to explicit reasonable expectations 
> for users and are thus focusing on stable releases only.
>
> Expectactions for development versions are another story: I am in
> favor of not trying to commit to _any_ expectactions for Org's main.
>
> For example, I would not mind a feature on main that relies on a new
> feature in the Emacs development branch, as long as we manage to keep
> the promise that the next Org stable is usable with the older Emacs
> releases.

So what your saying is that if the current main branch relies on a
new feature in the current Emacs development branch, then org must also
have a compatibility function so that the feature works with at least
the last 2 released versions (possibly 3 since we don't know when the
new Emacs version will be released and we may need/want to release main
before the new Emacs version is released).


So basically, if you want to use a new feature in development Emacs, you
will also need to implement a compatibility version for the previous 2
or 3 Emacs versions. This probably sounds worse than it is in practice
because most of the time, once you have a compatibility implementation
for the previous version, it will likely work with the previous 2 or 3
versions. It further means that a new feature added into Emacs cannot be
used in org without a compatibility version until it has been in Emacs
for 3 versions.