Re: On "next" packages and related confusions.

[Philip McGrath]

On Mon, Nov 11, 2024, at 7:50 PM, Divya Ranjan wrote:

> I think it would be appropriate if each "next" package had a code comment, or perhaps an addendum to its package description, describing how it relates to the main packaged version.

I think the whole "next" category is problematic. Why not just have a version number of that package that's different from the "main" one? So instead of emacs-next have emacs-30.0.9 or whatever. At least here the choice of arbitrariness is visible. A "next" makes no sense.

One problem with this is that tools resolve a bare package name like "emacs" to the package with that name with the greatest version. So if, for example, the base package is following a LTS channel, or if there's a reason to package a pre-release version, adding "-next" to the name ensures that users don't accidentally end up with a newer-than-recommended version.