Re: [ANN] org-ql 0.4 released

[Adam Porter]

Michael Alan Dorman <address@hidden> writes:

> On the other hand, I *also* don't assume that maintainers are incapable
> of making a reasonable assessment of the stability of their packages, or
> of making a personal choice to try to maintain API compatibility in some
> sensible way, and so forth.

If it were only a matter of maintainers assessing the stability of
individual packages, there would be no problem.  The problem is that
some packages depend on other packages, and their maintainers don't
coordinate the tagging of stable versions.  Everyone does their own
thing in their own time.  MELPA Stable can't solve that.

> And you know what: my personal experience over the last five years
> hasn't been subject to the problems you identify; perhaps I'm just
> lucky.

It works pretty well, except when it doesn't.

> Nevertheless, my experience leads me to be of the opinion that
> abolishing melpa-stable would reek of making the perfect the enemy of
> the good

AFAICT no good comes from using MELPA Stable.

> but I think that it is still an improvement to give maintainers *some*
> strategy for trying to manage their packages and their dependencies
> and communicate all this to their users

Even the most widely used, most impressive packages, like Magit and
Helm, don't consistently tag stable versions and don't use actual
semantic versioning.  There are no rules, so even if a few developers
were disciplined in their development and tagging, it would not justify
a user using MELPA Stable, because the other packages on it would not
live up to the same standards.  It doesn't offer what you seem to think
it does.

> rather than consigning every emacs user to doing individual curation
> for every single package they ever use.

That's not necessary.  Just put ~/.emacs.d/elpa in version control, and
when your config and package versions seem to be working, commit
everything.  Next time you upgrade packages, if something breaks and you
don't have time to fix it, rollback to what works and try again later.
If everything seems to work, commit the upgraded packages.  It's very
simple, and unlike MELPA Stable, it will give you actual stability.

> Given your position, though, could I suggest that you at least remove
> dependencies from your packgaes that feature versions that can only make
> sense with melpa-stable?  That's what ultimately started this: the fact
> that your new release of org-ql depends on a version of org-super-agenda
> that *looks* like you care about melpa stable.

I care about stability, not MELPA Stable.  It's your choice to use MELPA
Stable, and you're free to upgrade or downgrade individual packages to
work around such occasional, temporary breakage caused by it--the pieces
are yours to keep.  I'm sorry for any inconvenience, but your config is
up to you.