Re: Changed list indentation behavior: how to revert?

[Tom Gillespie]

> If people don't have time to read the NEWS file, I also doubt they would
> be aware of the mini config file or have the time to add it to their
> setup. There would be an additional burden on developers to maintain the
> mini-config which might not actually result in any real benefit. I would
> also be concerned this might setup an expectation which is difficult to
> meet. It may not always be straight-forward to provide such a
> mini-config and sometimes, it may actually be in the best interests of
> the user to force a change on them because it brings other benefits that
> outweigh the initial 'change pain'.

Clearly this would not work for all types of changes. However there are
numerous cases where a variable is changed from t to nil or similar where
such functionality would be straightforward to implement and might be
able to cover 80% of these kinds of issues.

It should be entirely possible to teach users that as part of their upgrade
process there is an option that they can set or command they can invoke
which will automatically make changes to their config to preserve old
default behavior. M-x org-post-update-restore-old-defaults or something.

There are also intermediate changes such as the addition of the :extend
keyword for faces which was given a default value that changed existing
behavior by defaulting to nil instead of t. This kind of change is a
combination of useful, annoying, and hard to fix without reading the
NEWS if it is something that breaks your workflow. Emacs is usually
pretty good about avoiding these kinds of major changes in behavior
but sometimes the slip through and sometimes a change does need
to be made and the best time to do so is as soon as possible.

I suspect that this might be an area where org could benefit from more
extensive testing coverage. There was a change between 9.1 and 9.3 that
completely broke org babel edit src functionality because it did not
correctly restore the window layout on exit. Now we just need to find
people willing to write the tests in addition to notifying the mailing list :D.

Best,
Tom