Re: Website revamp?

[Bo Grimes <vcg3rd@fastmail.com>]

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On 8/4/20 11:48 AM, Maxim Nikulin wrote:
> As to installation, I believe that org-mode bundled with Emacs is more 
> than enough for first try. It is a shorter path to become familiar 
> with most prominent features just to start editing of an .org file (or 
> to download a prepared demo .org). Getting the latest stable version 
> could be a next step for the hooked users. 

I might disagree, slightly, mostly with the last sentence.  This is one 
of the very few issues I feel semi-competent to comment on.  It would be 
impolite to actually say what I thought the only meaning of 'lisp' was 
before Emacs, which I had tasted and spit-out a dozen times before 
really reading in depth about org-mode.  I have expanded my Emacs 
horizons to include org-journal, emacs-w3m, org-roam, ERC,  and 
writeroom  modes, but I don't code.

This is relevant because I had always been satisfied with the built-in 
org-mode.  A couple of weeks ago, when I decided to give org-roam a try, 
my best guess is org-roam pulled in 9.3.6.  That is my best guess 
because suddenly it was there, and that is the only recent package I had 
installed.

That may not be the case, but regardless, I learned I had 9.3.6, which I 
never explicitly installed, when I ran into some errors.  I can no 
longer competently describe exactly what I was doing, but I am pretty 
sure it related to calling org-journal.  I know whatever I was doing 
caused an error message: "Invalid function: org-preserve-local-variables."

I spent some quite frustrating hours searching, and this error was 
frequently mentioned with org-refile, and I think helm and babel.  I was 
on the verge of mailing the list, but I wanted to say I had tried the 
best advice I found [1], and I did so by backing up my entire emacs.d 
and then deleting all .elc files. This worked. I've no understanding of 
the underlying technicalities, and I'm pretty sure I had never heard of 
byte-compiled files (except in the most general sense unrelated to 
Emacs).  It was literally like magic ( maybe magit :-) ) to me when 
Emacs repopulated all my .elc files!

I would, therefore, encourage any new users coming to org-mode and/or 
Emacs to start with the highest, most stable version of both that is 
available to them with their level of competence (for me that is always 
what is in my distro's package manager) and with the further 
explaination that they might run into issues down the road if they don't.

It is true that "[g]etting the latest stable version could be a next 
step for the hooked users", but I have used org-mode for five years 
without doing so, and many people may be so excited (like I was) that 
they finally found the One True Note-taking Tool (tm) that they 
immediately start blindly build an entire system only to crash into a 
byte-compiled wall. Their very first TODO should be "upgrade org-mode 
soon," [2] like "Call Mom" is in the todo.txt examples.

[1] https://github.com/syl20bnr/spacemacs/issues/11801 (I won't engage 
in the pretense of beginning my footnotes with 0 :-) )

[2] The idea that someone would use org-mode and not get "hooked" is 
paradoxically unimaginable.

--
Bo Grimes

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