Re: Proposal: Forwards-Compatibility Library for Emacs

[Philip Kaludercic]

Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

> Philip Kaludercic <philipk@posteo.net> writes:
>
>> So before I continue working on this, I would like to ask if there is
>> any interest/there are any objections to providing such a library?
>
> In the past, it was frowned upon to create these shims because of
> "pollution" and "cleanliness" and all that sort of stuff -- when
> something breaks, the question becomes "which version of `when-let*' was
> that, then?" which most users aren't able to answer.

To avoid this issue, I intentionally never overwrote the actual
function, so it should be possible to remove the compatibility layer,
and secondly the docstring for every compatibility function starts with
a line indicating that it is in fact a compatibility function:

  [Compatibility function for ‘cdddr’, defined in Emacs 26.1]

> That said, it's just so much more practical for package authors to have
> these compat shim libraries.  I naughtily had a gnus-compat.el library
> in the external Gnus distribution for a decade that did pretty much what
> you're doing here, and I can't recall anything breaking.
>
> So I'm for it.

Great, I'll ping this thread when the package is ready.

-- 
        Philip Kaludercic