On Mon, Feb 04, 2019 at 02:51:45PM +0100, Andreas Beckmann wrote:
> emacs has had a bad history (from piuparts point of view) of providing
> clean upgrade paths to newer versions. All versioned emacs packages were
> co-installable and there were no transitional packages provided ever to
> ensure upgrading to the next version. There were unversioned
> meta-packages, but many extension packages (that may be the wrong term,
> I'm not an emacs guy) also depended just on (some) (ancient) versioned
> emacs packages. This lead to cruft being kept installed that
> occasionally blew up some (seemingly unrelated) upgrade path in case an
> extension that was not compatible with several more current emacs
> releases already, suddenly was attempted to be compiled with a modern
> emacs. I vaguely remember fixing some of these via proposed-updates over
> the years, especially if the package was already gone from sid...
oh dear... :)
> This will all get better in buster which switched to unversioned emacs
> 25, now 26.1 - Yeah! for doing this - we just need to polish up all the
> upgrade paths that may lead to buster ... which probably means another
> round of Breaks being added to emacs-common ...
ok
> > I'm really not sure this is a sensible approach. Usually we try to get
> > rid off transitional packages, not to add new ones???!
>
> ... s.t. we can finally drop the transitional packages that were
> introduced in buster for buster +1
as long as that happens... and I guess it also doesnt matter whether we
have 200 or 203 transitional packages in Buster after all
> And if we can be sure that no ancient emacs may have survived buster, a
> lot of conditional code depending on the emacs version can be dropped
> from emacs-install scripts in extension packages.
great!
> > lenny was released almost exactly 10 years ago. We should let it go.
> It's just fascinating to see that we provide an operating system that
> can be successfully upgraded from release to release without ever
> requiring complete reinstallation :-) Just the hardware needs to be
> exchanged from time to time ;-P
hehe, indeed.
thanks for your feedback! (i have less fear for zillions of new
transitional packages now... ;)
--
tschau,
Holger
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