Re: Comment in verilog-mode.el about supported versions

[Wilson Snyder]

>> On Mon, Dec 19, 2016, 5:19 PM Tino Calancha <address@hidden> wrote:
>>>
>>> in the comentary of
>>> lisp/progmodes/verilog-mode.el
>>> you can find following comment:
>>> ;;    This code supports Emacs 21.1 and later
>>> ;;    And XEmacs 21.1 and later
>>> ;;    Please do not make changes that break Emacs 21.  Thanks!
>>>
>>> I could understand this comment in a version of this file
>>> elsewhere, e.g. ELPA, but not in the built-in version in Emacs.
>>> Why is this comment needed?
>>> Is it OK to drop from the master branch this kind of comments?

Please retain this, this entire file is identical with that
used on other versions of Emacs. It would be otherwise
be nearly impossible to manage diverging files.

>This reminds me, I posted a patch to fix a bug in verilog-mode, but
>left it unapplied because I wasn't sure about backwards compatibility:
>https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=23842#62

Thanks for your improvements.

It's perhaps reasonable to break a small number of things in
say Emacs 21, but this patch also breaks Emacs 23.1, which
is still relatively widely deployed for those on Redhat
distros, such as at my employer.

Perhaps the patch can be made backward compatible by
e.g. having verilog-complete-word be a defmacro to call the
standard functions when they are defined?  There's a bunch
of similar hackary see the many eval-and-compile blocks.
I'm not personally familiar with the completion part of
verilog-mode nor the related Emacs functions, or I'd do it.

-Wilson