Re: Confused by y-or-n-p

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Wed, 06 Jan 2021 23:57:02 +0000
> From: Gregory Heytings <ghe@sdf.org>
> cc: Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>, rudalics@gmx.at,
>         Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>, emacs-devel@gnu.org, rms@gnu.org,
>         juri@linkov.net
> 
>     Otherwise, you would have proposed a guideline. Which would be a fine 
> proposal, and AFAICT equivalent to what we have already.
> 
> Perhaps I did not look at the right place

The right place to look is in the discussions of the various changes,
where this guideline is voiced loud and clear.

> but I do not see such a rule or guideline in CONTRIBUTE or elsewhere. What do 
> you (and others) think of the following:

CONTRIBUTE is not the right place for this.  It is a document for
contributors, not for Emacs maintainers, and it describes rules, not
guidelines.  It is also already too large, and we risk losing the
attention of the "TL;DR" type of impatient readers.

I'm not convinced that we should have a document with guidelines, IME
it is very hard to formulate guidelines without risking too rigid
interpretation by someone.

>         ... developers start working on something thinking that scratching 
> the current state of affairs to create something they believe is better 
> without thinking about backwards compatibility ... 
> 
>     Do you have any evidence to back up the claim that this has happened?
> 
> It happened with y-or-n-p

The question was whether there's such a _tendency_, not whether
there are exceptions from the rule.

> It is happening in the "Stop frames stealing each other's minibuffers" thread

No, it doesn't.  In fact, the exact opposite happens there: an
assumption that the existing behavior is a bug was later reversed
based on feedback from you and others.

> Again this would not have happened with the above guideline.

Of course, it would: we will never have a rule to allow going back to
buggy behavior, so as long as the past behavior is considered a bug,
there can be no rule that prevents its removal without any
compatibility shims.

> My fear was that if the same request had been made by someone else it would 
> have been dismissed

Fear based on what?  I invite you to read the discussions of such
complaints, and see for yourself whether you have anything to that
effect to fear of.