Re: Some package questions

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org>]

On Mon, Jan 27, 2003 at 12:58:27PM +0100, Joakim Hove wrote:
>  2. I have read that the debian packages do not contain version
>     numbers from the packaged software. However for instance emacs
>     exists as both emacs20 and emacs21 packages, does that imply that
>     to debians packagesystem these two packages are *completely
>     unrelated*, and as a corollary there is no (debian) ugrade route
>     from the 20.xx versions of emacs to the 21.xx versions?

It's done this way so that you can install both at the same time. You
can only have one version of any given package installed at once. This
is not uncommon when users will find it a significant jump to go from
one version to the next.

I don't use emacs so can't speak for the upgrade route, but there's
often some care taken in such cases to ensure that the upgrade is
reasonably sane. After all, if you can install the two in parallel it
can't be that bad. Doesn't most of your configuration go in .emacs
anyway?

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                  [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]