Re: address@hidden: Re: Possible help with stable Emacs releases.]

[Robert J. Chassell]

    > After grepping for `emacs-version', it appears that changing the
    > current convention would require checking a surprisingly *huge*
    > amount of code.

Can we not just increment the last component of the existing
three-component version number?

Right now, emacs/lisp/version.el says

    (defconst emacs-version "21.3.50" "\
    Version numbers of this version of Emacs.")

Could not that be incremented to "21.3.51" for a bug fix release?

(Or better yet, have the release be "21.4.0" and the bug fix releases
be "21.4.1", "21.4.2", etc; this would enable us to continue to
specify a 50 for the next version's CVS trunk and a 90 for the
pretest, as in "21.4.50". ... Of course, I presume fewer than 50 bug
fix releases before a minor or major version number increment .... :)

Let's refer to the existing third component as the tertiant, with its
adjective being `tertiary'.  If for whatever reason, we need to
specify a variable then it would be the third of this sequence;

    emacs-major-version
    emacs-minor-version
    emacs-tertiary-version

as in 

(defconst emacs-tertiary-version
  (progn 
    (string-match "\\(^[0-9]+\\.\\([0-9]+\\).\\([0-9]+\\)\\)" emacs-version)
    (string-to-int (match-string 3 emacs-version)))
  "Version number of the third component of emacs-version.")

-- 
    Robert J. Chassell                         
    address@hidden                         GnuPG Key ID: 004B4AC8
    http://www.rattlesnake.com                  http://www.teak.cc