[Pkg-emacsen-addons] Bug#869509: Bug#869509: dh-elpa: please support tuning which emacs flavors to skip

[Sean Whitton]

Hello Aaron,

On Sun, Jul 23, 2017 at 03:10:46PM -0400, Aaron M. Ucko wrote:
> dh-elpa supplies emacsen-common install and remove scripts that
> hardcode the list of emacs flavors to skip as obsolete (GNU Emacs 23
> and below) or simply unsupported (XEmacs).  This one-size-fits-all
> approach has two drawbacks:
>  - It does not fully accommodate packages that have retained
>    compatibility with some or all of the skipped flavors.
>  - It forces packages that are compatible only with Emacs 25 to
>    declare outright conflicts with Emacs 24, rather than simply
>    skipping byte-compilation for it.
> 
> I find the latter particularly concerning, because the former is
> easier to work around.  (Yes, I do prefer Emacs 25 myself, but I keep
> a full range of Emacs flavors installed for compatibility testing.)
> 
> Please give packages an opportunity to tune the set of flavors to
> skip, and then use this feature to retire elpa-apiwrap's,
> elpa-ghub(+)'s, and elpa-magithub's conflicts with Emacs 24.

Based on previous conversations with Rob, the situation where we have
both emacs24 and emacs25 in Debian is meant to be temporary, and for
transitional purposes -- Rob and I tried to get emacs24 removed in time
for the stretch freeze, and it only remains because we didn't manage to
do that.  The aim is not to provide both Emacs 24 and Emacs 25 to users.

That would make all addons that are not compatible with the latest
version of Emacs buggy, because they would be blocking the transition.
It seems wrong for these addons to include any code referencing emacs24,
either Conflicts: fields, or some dh-elpa configuration.  They should,
rather, be in the state we would like them to be in once we've removed
emacs24.

(I think those packages with Conflicts: fields are buggy, regardless, as
that is far too heavy-handed for packages that just don't work when you
try to use them with emacs24.)

-- 
Sean Whitton
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 833 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-emacsen-addons/attachments/20170724/bf40a5ab/attachment.sig>