Wandering Thoughts archives

Backward compatibility, even for settings, has real costs

When I wrote about how I felt GNU Emacs configuration bankruptcy was inevitable in the longer term, one of the reasons was that Emacs configuration settings have changed over time (and will change more in the future), so that your old way of configuring something (like the C indentation style) would have to be updated periodically. One reaction to this is to say that open source software should keep backward compatibility for such settings. Unfortunately and as usual, such backward compatibility would have real costs; it would effectively act as a tax on development.

If you promise backward compatibility for settings, you must devote (programming) effort to mapping old settings to the new behavior and perhaps the new settings. Where there's no exact equivalent of the old setting's behavior, you may have to add code or additional (new) settings to synthesize that behavior, or materialize it if someone ever asks for it. Or you can only imitate the old setting value imperfectly, but then (some) people will complain. All of this takes work, especially if the setting is controlling some old behavior and old code that you're trying to move away from.

Open source software has finite time to spend on development (and increasing usage doesn't necessarily scale up the time available the way it can for commercial software). So the more backward compatibility you maintain, the more of your development time goes to that, and the less you're moving forward. And all of this is for something that you certainly hope fewer and fewer people are using over time, with new users and some number of old people moving to your current system of settings.

It's not surprising when large software like GNU Emacs doesn't preserve backward compatibility in settings, especially over the long term. In fact, I'd go further than that; it's a good thing when open source software doesn't attempt to do this if it's at all difficult. I'd much rather see limited resources going on improving the project and moving it forward rather than letting me not modify my .emacs for another year or three.

(Much of this applies to backward compatibility in general, at least in straightforward software that people use directly. Operating systems, libraries, and similar infrastructure things are somewhat different for reasons beyond the scope of this entry.)

That software forges are often better than email is unfortunate

Over on the Fediverse, there was a discussion of doing software development things using email and I said something:

My heretical opinion is that I would rather file a Github issue against your project than send you or your bug tracker email, because I do not trust you to safeguard my email against spammers, so I have to make up an entire new email address for you and carefully manage it. I don't trust Github either, but I have already done all of this email address handling for them.

(I also make up an email address for my Git commits. And yes, spammers have scraped it and spammed me.)

Github is merely a convenient example (and the most common one I deal with). What matters is that the forge is a point of centralization (so it covers a lot of projects) and that it does not require me to expose my email to lots of people. Any widely used forge-style environment has the same appeal (and conversely, small scale forges do not; if I am going to report issues to only one project per forge, it is not much different than a per-project bug tracker or bug mailing list).

That email is so much of a hassle today is a bad and sad thing. Email is a widely implemented open standard with a huge suite of tools that allows for a wide range of ways of working with it. It should be a great light-weight way of sending in issues, bug reports, patches, etc etc, and any centralized, non-email place to do this (like Github) has a collection of potential problems that should make open source/free software people nervous.

Unfortunately email has been overrun by spammers in a way that forges have not (yet) been, and in the case of email the problem is essentially intractable. Even my relatively hard to obtain Github-specific email address gets spam email, and my Git commit email address gets more. And demonstrating the problem with not using forges, the email address I used briefly to make some GNU Emacs bug reports about MH-E got spam almost immediately, which shows why I really don't want to have to send my issues by email to an exposed mailing list with public archives.

While there are things that might make the email situation somewhat better (primarily by hiding your email address from as many parties as possible), I don't think there's any general fix for the situation. Thanks to spam and abuse, we're stuck with a situation where setting yourself up on a few central development sites with good practices about handling your contact methods is generally more convenient than an open protocol, especially for people who don't do this all the time.

I think (GNU) Emacs bankruptcy is inevitable in the longer term

Recently I read Avoiding Emacs bankruptcy, with good financial habits (via). To badly summarize the article, it suggests avoiding third party packages and minimizing the amount of customization you do. As it happens, I have experience with more or less this approach, and in the end it didn't help. Because I built my old Emacs environment in the days before third party Emacs package management, it didn't include third party packages (although it may have had a few functions I'd gotten from other people). And by modern standards it wasn't all that customized, because I didn't go wildly rebinding keys or the like. Instead, I mostly did basic things like set indentation styles. But over the time from Emacs 18 to 2012, even that stuff stopped working. The whole experience has left me feeling that Emacs bankruptcy is inevitable over the longer term.

The elements pushing towards Emacs bankruptcy are relatively straightforward. First, Emacs wants personal customization in practice, so you will build up a .emacs for your current version of Emacs even if you don't use third party packages. Second, Emacs itself changes over time, or if you prefer the standard, built-in packages change over time to do things like handle indentation and mail reading better. This means that your customizations of them will need updating periodically. Third, the Emacs community changes over time in terms of what people support, talk about, recommend, and so on. If you use the community at all for help, guidance, and the like, what it will be able to help you with and what it will suggest will change over time, and thus so will what you want in your Emacs environment to go with it. Finally, both your options for third party packages and the third party packages themselves will change over time, again forcing you to make changes in your Emacs environment to compensate.

In addition, as the article implicitly admits, that a package is in the Emacs standard library doesn't mean that it can't have problems or effectively be abandoned with little or no changes and updates (for example, the state of Flymake for a long time). Sticking to the packages that come with Emacs can be limiting and restrictive, much like not customizing Emacs at all and accepting all of its defaults. You can work with Emacs that way (and people used to, back in the days before there was a vibrant ecology of third party packages), but you're being potentially hard on yourself in order to reduce the magnitude of something that's probably going to happen to you anyway.

(For instance, until recently not using third party packages would have meant that you did not have support for language servers.)

My view is that in practice, there's no way to leave your Emacs setup alone for a long time. You can go 'bankrupt' in small pieces of work every so often, or in big bangs like the one I went through (although the small pieces approach is more likely if you keep using Emacs regularly).

I don't think this is a bad thing. It's ultimately a choice on the spectrum between evolution and backward compatibility, where both GNU Emacs and the third party ecosystem would rather move forward (hopefully for the better) instead of freezing things once something is implemented.