On 8/15/2021 4:17 PM, Tim Cross wrote:
At some point, your transition period will end. If it isn't with the transition to v9.5, it will be the transition to 9.6. At this point, all of the issues you point out will still exist. There will still be people who are running multiple versions, there will still be people who failed to read or comprehend the impact of the change. All that the transition does is delay the pain point while adding additional complexity to the code base. Admittedly, in this case, the additional complexity is very small.
I think it does more than *just* delaying the pain. It's true that the transition period will end, and any users who haven't updated their configs by then will have a broken config. However, some percentage of users will upgrade Org, see the warning, fix their configs (perhaps not immediately, but in the next few weeks), and continue on with minimal pain. Of course, I'm sure most users would make the necessary change even without a transition period, but the transition period gives users a bit more flexibility in determining when to update their configs.
In any case, if Org were to add an informative message about this change, `org-capture-upgrade-templates' seems to me a reasonable place to do it since it's already doing this for other obsolete types. In fact, looking at the commit history, that function was added in Feb 2017 (in commit 0f1b5ec496), so perhaps it's been long enough that the old datetree migration could be removed entirely and be replaced with this new headline -> heading migration. That would have the net effect of *reducing* the total amount of compatibility code.
That said, this isn't a critical issue for me either way. I keep Emacs and Org pretty up to date so I shouldn't have a problem when the time comes to make this change in my config.
- Jim
