Emacs 29.1 released

Posted Aug 9, 2023 8:47 UTC (Wed) by mbunkus (subscriber, #87248)
In reply to: Emacs 29.1 released by jacktucker
Parent article: Emacs 29.1 released

> at least the intent is that nothing, or as few things as possible, should break when upgrading from one version to another.

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), and you will have to update your installed (M)ELPA packages fairly regularly with your Emacs updates. If you write a lot of elisp code or even maintain packages yourself, updating Emacs often means also updating a handful of things in your own code.

Also there are often user-visible changes to certain packages that might not strictly be Emacs itself, but are considered to be part of the base Emacs package. The most notably for me was the recent change in how TRAMP now requires a protocol (e.g. /ssh:root@… instead of just /root@…).

Are they major pain points? Hmmm not really, definitely not comparable to e.g. the amount of changes required for going from Python 2.x to 3.y. But they're there.

All that being said: my upgrade from 28.x to 29.1 last week went by pretty much without a hitch. Yes, I also updated all my installed (M)ELPA packages at the same time, but that was it. No further issues since. Like it very much!

Emacs 29.1 released

Posted Aug 10, 2023 3:57 UTC (Thu) by wtarreau (subscriber, #51152) [Link] (3 responses)

> 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.

Emacs 29.1 released

Posted Aug 10, 2023 13:04 UTC (Thu) by jacktucker (guest, #166423) [Link] (1 responses)

> 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.

I agree, that matches my experience as well! :) But as I said, when this happens, you can either read the NEWS file (which nobody does), or ask for help on help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org (which is much easier). Just list the errors you see, and you'll get help on how to fix them in a few hours. That's what I did, and it worked quite well.

Emacs 29.1 released

Posted Aug 10, 2023 17:45 UTC (Thu) by wtarreau (subscriber, #51152) [Link]

Thanks, I'll consider this in the future, maybe even once I try to upgrade my PC!

Emacs 29.1 released

Posted Aug 11, 2023 1:06 UTC (Fri) by repetitivestrain (guest, #165872) [Link]

We leave a wide berth (several years, maybe more than a decade in some cases) for packages to update after making a function obsolete, so most of the errors you see are likely in fact warnings that can be disabled through a button in the *Warnings* buffer. But when you do come into contact with errors, it is typically more helpful to grep for the missing function or variable in etc/NEWS* than it is to scour the WWW for answers.

Not that I approve of renaming functions for mere cosmetic reasons. I usually make a point out of advocating against such rash behavior.