bug#22628: Emacs: ^ in installed package list misses some upgrades

[Ludovic Courtès]

Alex Kost <address@hidden> skribis:

> The fact that we have 2 versions is the answer.  In Emacs UI a package
> is not considered to be obsolete if there is a package definition with
> the same name+version.
>
> That's why "texinfo 6.0" is green in the list, not red (as obsolete
> packages).

Oh, to me, ^ meant “upgrade”, like ‘guix package -u’ but only taking
into account the version number (‘guix package -u’ upgrades if the store
file name differs, even if the version number is the same.)

> I believe marking such packages as obsolete is not correct and it may be
> confusing.  See <https://gnunet.org/bot/log/guix/2016-02-09#T909651>.

I think we need a different solution for packages that have several
series.  For instance, we could have:

  (define gnupg-2.0
    (package …
      (properties `((series . "2.0")))))

and that would lead the various UIs to upgrade only to a package whose
version prefix is “2.0”.

WDYT?

Ludo’.