Subject: bug#44854: [PATCH] Add lexical-binding cookie to autoload files

From: Stefan Kangas <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2020 15:53:57 -0500

Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]> writes:

> See, this plan is not something that was even discussed, let alone
> decided upon.  When discussing such plans in private email, please
> consider the effect of that on people who didn't participate in those
> discussions: they see steps being taken without the goal being clearly
> announced and agreed upon.

I completely see your point Eli, and I understand your frustration.
Private plans could indeed play a negative role if they are not agreed
upon but implemented, especially when it comes to big issues such as
this one.

But the patch here was actually based on my impression that it was
generally agreed that we should convert files to use lexical-binding.
However, when you asked why I thought that these files should be
converted, even though there are few immediate practical benefits, I
felt that it deserved a full answer.

The other "plan" is not exactly (yet) worthy of that name to be honest.

Here's the story:

I have learned the hard way that a discussion on emacs-devel can
unfortunately very easily focus on exactly the wrong things.  I guess to
some extent that's just the result of the limitations of discussing via
email.  My intention was therefore to prepare something well-thought-out
that could hopefully constructively move things forward with
lexical-binding.

So I asked Stefan M privately what he thought about warning when
lexical-binding is not set to t.  He replied that it is a bad idea, and
that we should probably warn if it is not set to t or nil.  I agreed,
and that's pretty much it.

So the only "plan" that can be said to have existed was my personal
intention to bring it emacs-devel.  But I hadn't yet done so: I was
still mulling over the timing (before/after the relase of Emacs 28?) and
more importantly its content (i.e. I was planning to write up a patch).

I hope that clarifies things.  It was never my intention to surprise
anyone, least of all any of the maintainers.  Sorry for not being more
clear in my previous emails and having created confusion.

> I think before we make steps in this direction (as opposed to just
> switching more and more Lisp files to lexical-binding, where there's
> code that could benefit from that), we should actually discuss on
> emacs-devel and agree that this is our practical intention in the near
> future.

OK!  It sounds good to take this to emacs-devel.  Let's do it.