Re: GNU ELPA package for CC-mode

[Jostein Kjønigsen]

On Mon, Aug 20, 2018, at 1:45 AM, Stefan Monnier wrote:

I just tested the construction of a GNU ELPA package for CC-mode using

the :core thingy of elpa.git and everything looks good.

Who's going to be testing this?  I've a slight suspicion that sometimes

people add things to CC Mode that depend on things in master.  That would

be subotimal for ELPA.

This has not proved to be a problem for other packages we handle this

way (e.g. soap-client, python.el, ...).

One of the reasons is that it's so cheap&quick to release a new version

that such problems are trivial to solve if/when they show up.

cc-mode is not only used inside core Emacs, but also by third party developers.

cc-mode has historically been shipped as part of Emacs, and has (as I've understood things) tried to maintain a compatibility situation in line with that: i.e. a minor Emacs release should not warrant breaking changes in cc-mode.

When cc-mode has breaking changes, third-party major-modes deriving from cc-mode trying to provide a reasonable level of compatibilty (thus reducing friction for end-users), has previously had the option to check against the running version of Emacs to decide which code-path to use.

As such, a change like this seems to impact third-party major-modes deriving from cc-mode.

I'm not saying such a change universally and categorically will make things worse (I can see some things improving too), but I think it makes sense to consider the full impact of such changes before committing to them.

--

Regards

Jostein Kjønigsen

address@hidden 🍵 address@hidden

https://jostein.kjonigsen.net