Hello everyone,
Le vendredi 29 août 2025 à 11:31, Sean Whitton
<[email protected]> a écrit :
This makes sense to me, but do we know why it was ever useful?
Some upstream maintainers started pulling it as a dependency, in
order to not have to condition their code to emacs versions, while
also using the latest functions provided by the most recent emacs.
This library made sense to them insofar as it allowed them not to
have to update their code down the line.
Since the upstream maintainers of some third-party elisp libraries
started using it as a dependency, we had to package it to package
those libraries as well.
I guess it's only useful when the version of Emacs in Debian is
a major
version behind upstream? Which is generally only a short lived
situation?
Now, since a stub version of compat is included in emacs since
version 30, compat is only going to be useful to us if :
- a new function appears in the 31 branch.
- AND the maintainer of compat decides to implement it, and
release some version of compat 31.x.x.x.
- AND some third-party elisp maintainer (of a package we package
in debian) decides to pull this compat 31.x.x.x version as
dependency in order to use this brand new function.
If this happens and we have removed compat, we will have to wait
for emacs 31 to be released (and packaged by us) to be able to
package this new version of the third party elisp library.
I am not sure how likely this situation is, and whether this is
really a problem : we could perfectly decide to delay packaging a
new version of a third-party elisp library until after the needed
emacs version is released by upstream and packaged.
Best,
Aymeric
