Re: [BUG] Noweb reference eval syntax does not work

[Karsten Schmidt <info@toxi.co.uk>]

Hi all,

sorry for coming in super late to this thread, but I'd like to make a
plea to *not* deprecate the :noweb-ref header arg.

On 12 May 2016 at 19:35:15, Aaron Ecay wrote:

> To put it another way: it seems to me that the functionality of
> :noweb-ref can be reimplemented in terms of other primitives.  And given
> Nicolas’s comments about the complications and bugs it introduces, I’d
> be in favor of deprecating and eventually removing it.

I've been investing thousands of hours over the past years to author
several largish opensource projects (~40,000 SLOC total) exclusively
in org-mode, using hundreds of code blocks with :noweb-ref headers,
all of which would have to be replaced, re-tangled and the resulting
code re-tested, often manually... Maybe some of this could be
automated, but in any way it'll be a pretty large undertaking, which
I'd like to avoid, if possible...

I also think, having a feature deprecation like this should require a
major version change (depending how one interprets semantic
versioning) of org-mode (e.g v9.0.0). Already, I often struggle
convincing users of my libs that authoring libraries in org-mode is
better than in plain vanilla source code, but I think it'd be wrong to
not just force a non-standard tool, but then also specific versions of
that tool in order for people to help contributing.

Finally, and in summary, I never ever had a single issue w/
:noweb-refs and they're by far in my top 3 favourite org-mode
features... Please don't kill 'em!

Just my two pence...

K.
-- 
Karsten Schmidt
http://thi.ng | http://postspectacular.com | http://toxiclibs.org