Re: Version naming

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Stefan Monnier writes:

 > 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.

I don't know if Debian would be willing to make official packages with
relocatable installations (ie, /opt-style installation aka application
bundle) but that would help solve the problem (up to conflicting
external dependencies, but I doubt Emacs has many "must equal x.YY"
dependencies).  I don't do it any more (running in-place is easier)
but I did experiment with it successfully a while back for locally
created dpkgs of XEmacs.

The idea is basically that you can have a complete set of
{bin,etc,lib,man,share} trees under /opt/local/emacs-x.yy (ie, the
arch-dependent files would end up in
/opt/local/emacs-x.yy/lib/emacs-x.yy/x86_64-pc-gnu-linux/ or similar),
which is pretty redundant, but means that the versions don't compete
for the same file names in arch-independent hierarchies.

For more information about how this is managed, ask Mike Sperber about
--with-prefix=no.  I don't know the details.