Re: [PATCH] Rename headline to heading

[Jim Porter <jporterbugs@gmail.com>]

On 8/15/2021 4:17 PM, Tim Cross wrote:
> At some point, your transition period will end. If it isn't with the
> transition to v9.5, it will be the transition to 9.6. At this point, all
> of the issues you point out will still exist. There will still be people
> who are running multiple versions, there will still be people who failed
> to read or comprehend the impact of the change. All that the transition
> does is delay the pain point while adding additional complexity to the
> code base. Admittedly, in this case, the additional complexity is very
> small.

I think it does more than *just* delaying the pain. It's true that the 
transition period will end, and any users who haven't updated their 
configs by then will have a broken config. However, some percentage of 
users will upgrade Org, see the warning, fix their configs (perhaps not 
immediately, but in the next few weeks), and continue on with minimal 
pain. Of course, I'm sure most users would make the necessary change 
even without a transition period, but the transition period gives users 
a bit more flexibility in determining when to update their configs.

In any case, if Org were to add an informative message about this 
change, `org-capture-upgrade-templates' seems to me a reasonable place 
to do it since it's already doing this for other obsolete types. In 
fact, looking at the commit history, that function was added in Feb 2017 
(in commit 0f1b5ec496), so perhaps it's been long enough that the old 
datetree migration could be removed entirely and be replaced with this 
new headline -> heading migration. That would have the net effect of 
*reducing* the total amount of compatibility code.

That said, this isn't a critical issue for me either way. I keep Emacs 
and Org pretty up to date so I shouldn't have a problem when the time 
comes to make this change in my config.

- Jim