Add status update

[clemente]

Last update is from 5 years ago. Could you add some note about how this version compares to the official flymake?

[mohkale]

I'd like to ping this. I think @jcs090218 is the maintainer for this repo now. Today I rebuilt Emacs git and got some strange warnings related to flymake-log:

internal-macroexpand-for-load: Eager macro-expansion failure: (error "Eager macro-expansion skipped due to cycle:
  … => (load \"flymake.el\") => (macroexpand-all (defalias 'flymake-mode …)) => (macroexpand (flymake-log …)) => (load \"flymake.el\")")

Seems like the recipe for this repo is in el-get and straight decided to auto pull it in for my Emacs config. The current flymake in this repo looks very old compared to the version maintained in Emacs itself. I think if this is a fork and not one that's maintained relatively closely with the actual flymake in Emacs then it should be renamed or archived. For now I just removed el-get from my straight package archives since I don't even use any packages with el-get recipes.

     (delq 'el-get straight-recipe-repositories)

[illusori]

As the person who originally forked it, the README is one giant note about what differs from the point of forking.

I have no idea what the current state of the official flymake, which was essentially abandoned when I forked - since that time it will have to have been updated quite extensively to work with modern versions of emacs, but beyond that I don't know what has changed functionally.

I'm no longer involved in maintaining the project, or even using it myself - I've moved on to using flycheck as it's far superior and follows a design philosophy I'd have used if I'd been writing flymake from scratch rather than attempting to fix an existing package. I'd honestly suggest that if you can move to flycheck that you do so.

[mohkale]

@illusori

the README is one giant note about what differs from the point of forking.
I have no idea what the current state of the official flymake, which was essentially abandoned when I forked

I don't believe that's very relevent. Flymake has gone through a major revision and is basically a new project compared to the time of forking. At this point it's much more like flycheck, I'd argue the current interface is a little cleaner actually.

Regardless I don't particularly care whether the flymake in this repo is better than the one in Emacs or vice versa, I'd just like to have my Emacs not pull in a distant fork from something maintained in the mainline because they have the same name. My goal is really just to have this project archived or renamed.

[illusori]

Ah, well that part of the response was belatedly to the original issue.

I'm not sure why el-get would be pulling in this version of flymake. This repo is version 0.4.16 and the version with emacs is 1.3.4, not that they're meaningfully comparable because of the divergent forks, but clearly the version with emacs has a higher version number and shouldn't be being overwritten by a lower version number.

[mohkale]

It's not el-get itself but straight. I think I depended on a package that depended on flymake and since normally you don't depend on something like flymake directly (since it's builtin) but on the emacs version with the flymake version you need, straight ended up trying to find somewhere to install it from and el-get was just the earliest of the repositories that porported to have a recipe for flymakel. I didn't spend too much time trying to investigate why, I just fixed it by setting:

(setq straight-recipe-overrides '((nil
                                        (flymake :type built-in))))

Regardless, there really shouldn't be an obsolete version of a package like this hosted somewhere. Doubly so if it's incompatible with the maintained version and from the time it's taken to get a response on some of the open issues may not be maintained at all.

[clemente]

My goal is really just to have this project archived or renamed.

Renaming it could help. The current name https://github.com/flymake/emacs-flymake/ can give the impression that it's the official one (the one included in emacs). But this one is older and apparently not maintained.

@jcs090218, since you have done recent changes to this repository, maybe you could rename it?, or use the README to mention that it's not up to date anymore compared to the flymake.el in emacs.

[illusori]

The issue with renaming is that it breaks things for people who genuinely want to use this version, which is an unknowable number of people.

This fork bumped the version from the point where it was forked, with a minor version bump because it's backwards compatible, which is correct behaviour.

The emacs maintainers bumped their version past this one in their version, including a major version bump to indicate incompatibility, which is correct behaviour.

People who don't know or care, should be getting the highest version number: the official distro. People who want this version can pin to the major version and get a version that maintains compatibility with that major version. Their install will continue working into the future as they intended.

If your package manager is doing something different, that is where the fault lies. It should NOT be overwriting a higher version package with a lower version package unless you have specifically asked it to.

Adding a note to the top of the README saying that the emacs official distro has a higher version non-backwards-compatible with v0.. flymake (including this one) is a sensible move. Wording suggestions welcome.

[clemente]

@illusori Makes sense, thanks. I created a pull request with ideas: #34

By the way, I don't remember why I opened this task; I think I was just confused after seeing many similarly named repositories. I hadn't problems with package managers.

[illusori]

@jcs090218 I don't know if you've been following along with the discussion here, but this seems like a solid PR to merge to resolve the issue. I'm gonna bow out and leave it to you to resolve now that I've provided the historical context. :)

[jcs090218]

Sorry, was being busy recently. 😓 The PR looks good to me! 👍