Emacs 29.1 released

Interesting. I don't remember what it was exactly with indent, but it changed once significantly between 24 and 27 (I think there was a first major step between 24 and 25 and another smaller one later). I seem to remember that a new mechanism with a fancy name was used instead of the previous one. But I'm not fluent in these things, I really do not want to become a developer of my editor, I'm just a user. It's possible that some of the accompanying packages broke or worked differently, but I clearly remember a news indicating we'd be getting a much better thing than before.

I must say I don't have the reflex to file bugs related to incompatible changes, I imagine they're expected, and frankly when I have to start working on my activities and spend 3-4 hours trying to get my editor back in a state where it's barely usable, the last thing I want to do is to set everything aside and switch to an editor debugging session. That's too central a piece of program for lots of developers.

What I'm really missing is the ability to roll back to an older version in fact. Usually it comes with plenty of packages and it seems everything is tightly coupled, so if you want to roll back you need to roll back everything, and often the older binaries are incompatible with the newer distro due to dependencies on older libs (which is not emacs' fault, just the total mess that lib dependencies on distros is due to some libs having no consideration for strict forward compatibility).

Sadly it's much easier and riskless to upgrade a kernel than an editor, because if it doesn't work, you just restart from the previous one and you're done. The kernel is only an isolated binary with zero dependency. An editor is in fact much more of a whole ecosystem and you rarely have that flexibility.

> Given that what changed is Emacs itself and not a package, of course, but in that case the fault doesn't lie with us.

As someone who has used Emacs for about 40 years, but is only now trying to turn Emacs into a Java IDE, I want to say that Emacs's biggest weakness is not the instability of the core, but the packages. The packages change a lot, and their inter-compatibility is a challenge. I long for some kind of super-packages for more complex tasks like creating an IDE, which requires getting 15-20 packages from different sources to play nicely together. Or at least some official documentation; the situation today is that you have to search the web for third party instructions, which are typically outdated and abandoned.

> Yeah that's not how I see it really happening. They always deprecate some functions in favor of others (often only to better match certain naming schemes),

I agree, that matches my experience as well. After an upgrade, my old config spews errors that I have no idea how fix. I do not remember any *single* upgrade that did not report such errors.

The problem when the config is a programming language based on functions, is that you cannot get useful hints such as "this keyword is now deprecated in favor of XXX, please adjust your config". No, instead you get stuff like "unknown function" or "no such variable" and whatnot. For a user this is extremely frustrating because you just want to be able to do your work as you did before the upgrade and you end up having to waste 4 hours scanning the net looking for others facing similar errors, and blindly copy-pasting there random stuff you don't understand until you recover a barely tolerable behavior that allows you to try to restart your work where you left it without wasting more time.

And I'm really not using anything fancy. My emacs is just an editor, mostly for C (with tags), sometimes for plain text files and occasionally for bash scripts. It doesn't do any of the eye-candy stuff I'm seeing others configure such as auto-completion, make, git integration, mail reader, browser etc. And once in a while I open a remote file, when google manages to remind me the syntax for what looks like a URL but is not. It's just an editor that I find comfortable when it works because it supports multiple files, multiple windows, including with the same file in several windows and copy-paste between multiple processes. I'm sure emacs developers would be extremely disappointed by seeing my simple level of usage and that I probably totally ignore most of the features they work on on a daily basis, and whose presence justifies breaking my usage from time to time.

I got used to its key bindings but I could probably switch to a much lighter reimplementation that supports the same bindings, multi-window/ediff, and syntax highlighting. Before X was a regular thing on Linux, I used to use "joe" which was quite good and light by then. But xemacs then emacs made it more comfortable to work on multiple files.