Re: Stability of core packages (was: Not easy at all to upgrade :core packages like Eglot)

[Lynn Winebarger <owinebar@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Apr 19, 2023 at 6:51 PM Lynn Winebarger <owinebar@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 19, 2023 at 2:37 PM Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
> > In any case, I don't think this use case was considered or tried
> > enough for us to consider it a solved issue.  I'm quite sure there's
> > more here than meets the eye, simply because this is rarely if ever
> > done.

> My only other thought on this discussion, as a package (ab)user
> running multiple versions of emacs, is that package releases should be
> dependent on the emacs version installing it.  What I see as available
> packages/upgrades when I list packages while running emacs 28 should
> probably be different (for some packages) than what I see while
> running emacs 25 or emacs 29.  It seems like the release philosophy
> after version 24 has been conservative about changes to the run-time
> semantics per major release, so the versioning probably doesn't need
> to be conditioned on the minor version of the Emacs binary.

Another point in favor of maintaining separate dependencies based on
emacs major version (and possibly more) are addition of features like
the builtin sqlite support.  Some packages might require the sqlite
module for versions prior to 29, or the sqlite-builtin module for 29+,
but the latter dependency is incompatible with version 28 and below.

Lynn