Re: Version naming

[Stefan Monnier]

>> The real underlying cause is dpkg's inability to handle simultaneous
>> installs of different versions of the same package.  As a result, you
>> get more work, as you point out, and I can't easily keep around all the
>> versions I'd like to keep.
> It depends.  We can install multiple different versions of Python
> simultaneously, including both Python 2[*] and Python 3, but it took a lot of
> work both in upstream and in Debian by the Python maintainers to make that
> happen.

But you only get to do that by lying to dpkg and pretending that python2
and python3 are just different packages rather than different versions
of the package.  So you need to know beforehand which sets of packages
people may want to keep together.

The packaging of Emacs does the same with distinct emacs19, emacs20,
emacs21, emacs22, emacs23, and emacs24 packages, each with its own set
of versions.  For those users who only want "emacs", it leads to
superfluous packages lying around.  For the maintainers, it leads to
extra work.  And for users like me, it still doesn't let me cleanly
install Emacs-24.1, Emacs-24.2, and Emacs-24.3 at the same time.


        Stefan