Re: [jerome.marant@free.fr: Re: Possible help with stable Emacs releases.]

[Rob Browning <rlb@defaultvalue.org>]

Francesco Potorti` <pot@gnu.org> writes:

> While I want to make clear once again that this is a separate issue,
> which is completely independent from the previous one, yes, I agree
> that clearly indicating which releases are bugfix-only and which are
> not would be valuable.

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.

The Debian Emacs Policy is set up based on that assumption so that we
can have multiple major versions of Emacs installed without breakage.
This was very important back during the transition from emacs19 to
emacs20 because there were many users who had code that they couldn't
afford to port immediately.  It can also be important because it may
take a while for all of Debian's Emacs sub-packages (calc, bbdb, gnus,
psgml, ...) to be updated to work with the new major version of Emacs.

(In part, the Debian policy arranges things so that a given add-on
 package can tell which Emacs "flavor" it's being installed for, and
 can make decisions based on that if necessary.)

If Emacs ever had a nominal minor release that was really a major
release (which was significantly incompatible in some way), it could
cause a painful transition.

-- 
Rob Browning
rlb @defaultvalue.org and @debian.org; previously @cs.utexas.edu
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