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From: | Dmitry Gutov |
Subject: | Re: RCS, again: another removed functionality: undo last-checkin |
Date: | Thu, 1 Oct 2015 20:36:19 +0300 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:41.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/41.0 |
On 10/01/2015 04:07 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
No. Existing features might make no sense if (a) they didn't make sense when introduced (it happens!),
You mean features that were useless or broken from the start?
or (b) if the reason for their existence is no longer valid, like a program that is no longer available, or operation that is impossible with today's platforms, or so clearly unused that there's no doubt it could be still useful to anyone.
...or became irreparably broken over time. That's a pretty high standard to consider a feature for removal.
When I said "doesn't make sense", I meant sense in the context of the VC framework. Which supposedly has some internal logic, ergonomics, etc.
Breaking backward compatibility is about the worst crime package maintainers could commit, in my opinion. (I know it's not shared by many of the others.)
This general opinion (and you're not alone holding it) is one of the most tedious parts of the Emacs ecosystem, IME. It's not that I *love* removing features, but being unable to do that at all makes the burden of a maintainer harder when making changes or adding new features.
It makes veteran users of a package feel like second-class citizens whose needs and workflows can be disregarded all too easily.
Removing features is always a tradeoff. While no one wants to make old users sad, if their needs would still be achievable at the cost of workflow changes, we should be able to make that sacrifice.
At some point in the future (distant, in all likelihood, so this is just a rough example), I imagine that would mean sacrificing support for antique VC backends entirely, in favor of simpler VC implementation, or better support of the newer backends. There's nothing stopping the veterans from adopting modern VCSes, you know.
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