On 8/14/2021 3:54 PM, Tim Cross wrote:
I'm not convinced a transition period will help in this case. At some point, users will need to update their capture templates regardless. Provided this impact is clearly outlined in the NEWS.org file (I think there should be a specific reference to capture templates added in the patch to NEWS.org) and provided this change is applied to the next release only, no transition period is necessary.
I think having a transition period would be helpful here. First, this helps to account for users who may run multiple versions of Emacs with the same config. This could happen for a few reasons, such as running on different revisions of a GNU/Linux distribution, or even just because the user is testing out the latest/next version of Emacs.
In addition, a transition period makes it easy to inform users about what they need to do to upgrade. Without any compatibility code, the error message (likely) won't be very helpful, whereas even some minimal compatibility code could tell the user what edits to make to their config. While everyone *should* read the manual/NEWS, it's easy to miss things sometimes, and errors like this can be non-obvious, especially if the compatibility issue isn't directly in the user's config, but in some other third-party package.
As such, I think it would be nice to have a transition period of at least one Emacs version. Beyond that, I don't see any problems with excising old compatibility code. As you say, users will have to upgrade at *some* point.
- Jim
