|
|
Subscribe / Log in / New account

Emacs 29.1 released

Emacs 29.1 released

Posted Aug 10, 2023 4:09 UTC (Thu) by wtarreau (subscriber, #51152)
In reply to: Emacs 29.1 released by repetitivestrain
Parent article: 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.


to post comments

Emacs 29.1 released

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

> 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.

Yes, that's electric-indent-mode which was enabled by default in Emacs 24. I did not see that change, when I started using Emacs it was at version 25.

> I must say I don't have the reflex to file bugs related to incompatible changes

It's also something I did not do earlier, because I did not know it is so easy: all you need is to send an email to help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org. In my experience the community there is friendly.


Copyright © 2025, Eklektix, Inc.
Comments and public postings are copyrighted by their creators.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds