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.