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

[Jérôme Marant]

Quoting Stefan <address@hidden>:

> > Actually now that I think about it, at least for those packaging
> > Emacs, it's somewhat critical.  Right now Debian pacakges Emacs as
> > emacsXY where XY is the major number (i.e. emacs19, emacs21, etc.).
> > This is done under the assumption that only a change in XY signals the
> > potential for major breakage.
>
> While I mostly agree that we should change emacs-major-version for
> non-bug-fix releases, I think that limitations of specific packaging systems
> are not a motivating factor.
>
> I actually think that your problems should cause you to reconsider the
> design of the packaging system since such problems surely happen with other
> packages as well.

Versioning package names is so far the best solution for avoiding binary
incompatibilities after upgrades.
It is usually being done with shared library package names by appending
the soname to the library name.

If 21.4 brings incompatibilities (that is, emacs modes needs to be modified
in order to work properly), we may decide to change the package name
to emacs21.4.

Cheers,

--
Jérôme Marant