Re: Saving minibuffer history

[David Kastrup]

"Drew Adams" <address@hidden> writes:

>     >     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?

No.  Emacs 22 code needs to be compatible with Emacs 22, not with any
other Emacs version.

For packages maintained outside of Emacs, the maintainer might have
different priorities, but that's not interesting for Emacs development
proper and this mailing list.  In many cases, XEmacs compatibility
actually is correlated to Emacs 20, since the XEmacs 21.4 core has
never thoroughly been synchronized with Emacs 21.

> 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?"

Because it is work finding out whether all other things are equal, and
which is the "backward-compatible" solution, if one considers it to
make sense to talk about "backward-compatible" for what _is_ supposed
to be a proper part of Emacs 22.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum