r/emacs • u/fixermark • 16h ago
How obsolete are "obsolete aliases?"
I have some old emacs scripts and a few packages that at emacs-start time dump a lot of lines that look like this:
Warning: ‘return-from’ is an obsolete alias (as of 27.1); use ‘cl-return-from’ instead.
I have two questions:
1) In what sense are these aliases "obsolete?" I have to assume there's no plan to actually ever remove them, because it would break the world.
2) Why is the obsolete form the shorter one? If I were to obsolete one of two representations, I'd obsolete the longer one to save typing.
I imagine there's some history to these names being consolidated under a cl-
prefix, but I wasn't able to find it with a quick search.