Hello, On Mon 01 Sep 2025 at 01:09pm +02, Aymeric Agon-Rambosson wrote: > Hello everyone, > > Le vendredi 29 août 2025 à 11:31, Sean Whitton <spwhitton@spwhitton.name> a > écrit : > >> This makes sense to me, but do we know why it was ever useful? > > Some upstream maintainers started pulling it as a dependency, in order to not > have to condition their code to emacs versions, while also using the latest > functions provided by the most recent emacs. This library made sense to them > insofar as it allowed them not to have to update their code down the line. > > Since the upstream maintainers of some third-party elisp libraries started > using it as a dependency, we had to package it to package those libraries as > well. > >> I guess it's only useful when the version of Emacs in Debian is a major >> version behind upstream? Which is generally only a short lived >> situation? > > Now, since a stub version of compat is included in emacs since version 30, > compat is only going to be useful to us if : > - a new function appears in the 31 branch. > - AND the maintainer of compat decides to implement it, and release some > version of compat 31.x.x.x. > - AND some third-party elisp maintainer (of a package we package in debian) > decides to pull this compat 31.x.x.x version as dependency in order to use > this brand new function. > > If this happens and we have removed compat, we will have to wait for emacs 31 > to be released (and packaged by us) to be able to package this new version of > the third party elisp library. > > I am not sure how likely this situation is, and whether this is really a > problem : we could perfectly decide to delay packaging a new version of a > third-party elisp library until after the needed emacs version is released by > upstream and packaged. Thanks for the analysis. I don't think the compat-el maintainers would ever do that, so I still think we should remove compat-el. -- Sean Whitton
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