RE: Saving minibuffer history

[Drew Adams]

    >     Uh, Emacs 20?  Why would one need to be compatible with that?
    > Many, many people do use Emacs 20, for a variety of reasons.

    Please remove emacs-devel from the Cc when discussing such issues.

Why? This was the gist of my reply:

 If nothing is gained by breaking backward compatibility, why break it?

Is that not worthy of consideration as a design/development consideration
for Emacs?

I'm not sure what the "such issues" are that you object to discussing. I did
not discuss Emacs 20 and its relative virtues or disadvantages. My point was
only the one quoted here - a suggestion of consideration, for future
development, of not breaking old code gratuitously - that is, not breaking
backward compatibility unless there is some advantage in doing so. The
advantage could be as slight as more readable code - I wasn't asking for
more than opting for compatibility when things are _equal_.

I didn't suggest testing new code with Emacs 20, or placing the burden of
showing zero cost for compatibility on Emacs developers, or anything of the
sort. I simply raised the design/development question, "_if_ other things
are equal, why not choose the backward-compatible solution?"

Even if there might be disagreement over the suggestion, is this not a
proper place for its discussion?