Timeline for Policy on Emacs compatibility of answers
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
9 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Dec 1, 2014 at 9:47 | comment | added | T. Verron | "If your answer requires 24.4 and the question didn't mention that, your answer has a high chance of not even being useful to the asker, let alone other visitors." This, this and this! Your answer belongs to you, but your primary goal should be to be useful to readers, not to try to force them to install the most recent version... For example, how about users who are using emacs at work? | |
| Nov 30, 2014 at 12:43 | comment | added | Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' | @lunaryorn I cited some popular distributions that ship older versions. I didn't cite Arch because it has a recent version, so it's irrelevant. The situation is not symmetric: newer versions can run code that works in older versions, but the converse is not true. You don't have to write answers about older releases than you're used to, but you should mention in your answer that it might not be suitable for most readers. | |
| Nov 30, 2014 at 8:28 | comment | added | user227 | Besides, that relevance has Debian here? It's just one arbitrary distribution. I could just as well argue that Arch has 24.4 by now. Why should I write answers with outdated code, just because an arbitrary distribution ships outdated software? If 23.4 was the base line, we couldn't even recommend package.el... | |
| Nov 30, 2014 at 8:25 | comment | added | user227 | @Gilles I do not use 23.4. I do not even support it in any of my packages. How am I reasonably supposed to write answers about this release? ! | |
| Nov 30, 2014 at 0:43 | comment | added | Malabarba Mod | On the general topic of the question, 23.4 sounds like a good target for those authors who want to reach the most users. | |
| Nov 30, 2014 at 0:25 | comment | added | Malabarba Mod |
ok, I'll just accept our diverging opinions. :-) To me, there's value in teaching people about with-eval-after-load (and other new features), and simply replacing it with something else took that value away. Of course, it added value in terms of compatibility, but it still took something away.
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| Nov 30, 2014 at 0:18 | comment | added | Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' |
@Malabarba No, merely replacing with-eval-after-load with eval-after-load in that answer should have been an edit, not a separate answer. It isn't proposing a different method (it's not like the question was about running code when loading a package), it's just a minor improvement on an existing answer.
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| Nov 30, 2014 at 0:09 | comment | added | Malabarba Mod | Backwards compatibility is important. New features are important too. The edit made the answer better in one sense, and made it worse in another, I wouldn't call that a good edit. It would have been better as a separate answer, or it could have just added the extra option without erasing the existing one. | |
| Nov 29, 2014 at 23:51 | history | answered | Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' | CC BY-SA 3.0 |