Why multiple Emacs flavours?

[Jérôme Marant]

Rob Browning <rlb@defaultvalue.org> writes:

> If we don't support multiple flavors of emacs, then we force everyone
> to upgrade as soon as the new version comes out.  At least back during

But isn't it what's happening for most programs in Debian?

> the emacs19 to emacs20 transition, this was perceived by many users as
> a *huge* problem.  Many of them had (or claimed to have) a lot of
> existing software which wasn't compatible with emacs20, and which
> couldn't easily be ported (and it might be that some add-on packages
> were never ported).  Further, emacs20 was claimed to be much more
> resource intensive, and a big burden on some of the hardware available
> at the time (see the Mule controversy, etc.).
>
> Supporting both emacs19 and emacs20 for a while gave those people for
> whom the transition was a problem more time to accomodate the changes,
> and it wasn't nearly as much work for us as it might have been since
> we already needed the emacsen-common infrastructure in order to be
> able to handle both emacs and xemacs.

Package compatibility is a good reason for keeping and old flavour.
But it shall only be transitionnal IMHO.

> OTOH, supporting more than one flavor *is* more work, but in cases
> like emacs20 -> emacs21, where the upstream changes aren't nearly as
> substantial as they were during emacs19 -> emacs20, the need to
> support two flavors for any appreciable amount of time is much lower.
> i.e. the point at which I can start tagging bugs as "wontfix ->
> upgrade to emacsN+1 is be much sooner.
>
> Also, even if we don't provide extremely active support for the older
> flavors, they still allow users who don't want to fully upgrade
> immediately, but want to be able to try the newer emacs, an easy way
> to do so.

I think we should not support old flavour at all. It is not reasonnable
to spend some time on fixing bugs that have already been released
in the last stable release.

We can leave the old version in the archive until all emacs packages have
been ported to this new version.

For instance, once all packages have been ported to emacs22, we can
remove emacs21: people willing to stay with emacs21 can always grab
the version from sarge.

> Hope this helps.

Yes, thanks.

-- 
Jérôme Marant