Re: On "next" packages and related confusions.

[Divya Ranjan <divya@subvertising.org>]

"Philip McGrath" <philip@philipmcgrath.com> writes:

> 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.

But that should be handled differently I believe. Since this only creates confusion. Can there be a way to sort of "pin" the release version to the namespace "emacs" and other versions to be emacs-x.x. Or at least remove the arbitrariness of emacs-next and keep it updated to the master like emacs-git in Arch.

Regards,
-- 
Divya Ranjan,
Philosophy, Mathematics, Libre Software.