Re: emacs-24.5-rc3.tar.xz modified in place

[Ulrich Mueller <ulm@gentoo.org>]

>>>>> On Fri, 10 Apr 2015, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> It was done on purpose, to shorten the release time.  Nicolas did as
> instructed.

What sort of excuse is this?

Please, never ever modify a distfile in place without updating its
version number. It would have been no problem to use -rc4 here. The
modified file in question, emacs-24.5-rc3.tar.xz, had already been
fetched by the Gentoo mirror system. I have updated it now (and the
checksums recorded in our package's manifest), but it will take some
time for the new files to propagate, so in the mean time users will
get checksum failures.

What do you do if you receive a bug report for rc3? You don't know if
it was for the old or the new rc3. (Oh, it doesn't matter because
there were only cosmetic changes? Then there was no need to update the
distfile, in the first place.)

Also this isn't the first time that such a thing has happened:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2011-08/msg00028.html

> Distributions should not pick up alpha releases without asking
> first.

It is entirely the decision of a distro what they include and what
they don't. The release candidate is distributed under the GPL-3, so
why should anyone have to ask before redistributing it? And it's not
an alpha release but supposedly the final release candidate, so it
should be in everyone's interest if it gets as much testing as
possible. Certainly, Gentoo won't include any rc in stable, but we
have an unstable/testing branch for such purposes.

Ulrich