Re: Support of older Emacs versions

[Stefan Monnier]

>>> Thanks for your thoughts.  What version of emacs is in Ubuntu 20?
>> My laptop (on Xubuntu 20.04.6) has emacs 26.3. (I don't use emacs, so I
>> probably haven't done anything to update it past whatever comes with
>> the distribution.)
>> And if I install emacs on my personal Debian 11 server, I get 27.1
>
> The "Long Term Support" versions of Ubuntu are every 2 years and have
> 5 years of support.  Ubuntu 20.04 will be EOL in April of next year, so
> that's 9 months, and maybe not worth the effort.  Ubuntu 22.04 (with emacs
> 27) is still heavily used.  24.04 has recently come out, and has emacs 29.

FWIW, so far in my cleanups I tried to remove only the compatibility
code for Emacs<22.  Of course past experience suggests that I probably
inadvertently broke compatibility with some more recent versions.
But I'd be surprised if it's not compatible with at least Emacs-24 and
any incompatibility should be easy to fix once reported.

As I mentioned earlier, the desire to preserve compatibility with XEmacs
ensures or at least encourages to preserve compatibility with older
Emacsen as well.


        Stefan