Subject: bug#35739: Bad signature from GNU ELPA

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 24 May 2019 22:43:48 +0300

> From: Stefan Monnier <[email-masked]>
> Cc: [email-masked],  [email-masked],  [email-masked]
> Date: Fri, 24 May 2019 15:31:42 -0400
> 
> > And why is that relevant to the issue at hand, which is not to make
> > backward-incompatible changes in existing APIs?
> 
> I consider myself fairly well versed in Emacs's coding systems.  Yet,
> I don't know what decoding text into a unibyte buffer will do and can't
> find any doc that describes it.
> 
> I such a context, I think preserving such a behavior is harmful in the
> long term because it will keep fundamentally buggy code half-working
> and keep spreading confusion about how coding systems work and people
> copy&pasting broken code.
> 
> In the long term, I think we're better off introducing limited
> breakage where it leads to clearer errors that help clear up such
> confusions and fix bugs.

I disagree.  This stuff worked for decades, and breaking it only
because it is under-documented is not a good idea.  I'm okay with
documenting what that produces somewhere, but not with breaking it.