Re: Files in wrong subdirs of emacs/lisp?

[Juanma Barranquero]

On Sat, 24 May 2003 08:49:31 -0400, Thien-Thi Nguyen <address@hidden> wrote:

> in the context of providing things "useful" indicates only potentiality.
> in the context of using things "useful" indicates some (perhaps large)
> amount of actual use.

Of course.

> because not all users are represented in these
> discussions, we cannot assume the latter context holds.  if you purport
> to represent all users you lose credibility.

I sincerely hope that "you" is meant as generic and you're not
suggesting I did such a thing.

So, assuming the generic, what you're saying is that we can *never*
obsolete anything, because we can never be sure there's no "some amount
of actual use". Funnily enough, in the 21.X series we've declared
obsolete at least 40 functions and variables without too much worring
about the actual amount of use...

> something can be rendered "not useful" in the providing context if it is
> not cleanly composable w/ other provided things or if there is a clear
> bug in it standalone, in which case we have the option of fixing these
> problems in order to return it to a "useful" state (but that's still
> only a potential wrt the other context).

I think you're being way too "philosophical" for something as
unconsecuential as deciding if some modules should be in lisp/ or
lisp/obsolete/. Even if we moved some files to obsolete/, users wouldn't
see any difference (obsolete is in subdirs.el). Emacs still has
variables and functions that were deemed obsolete "before 19.15" (dot*,
baud-rate, buffer-flush-undo...), so it's not like we're going to empty
obsolete/ any century now.

This is getting ridiculous. RMS asked about alternate locations for modules.
I've suggested some. Others don't like. That's all there is.

                                                           /L/e/k/t/u