Re: Version naming

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Stefan Monnier writes:

 > 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.

They are different packages, as different as, oh, Emacs and Guile. :)
It's possible to maintain sources that are compatible with both, but
their interpreters and standard libraries etc. are completely separate
now, and their dependencies are growing apart rapidly.

Your statement is true to a great extent among python2x packages, and
to some extent (more and more so over time) for python3x packages,
though.

 > 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.

I'm not clear on what you mean by "cleanly".  I suspect that in the
general case you need application bundles, with non-forward-compatible
dependencies installed in the bundle.  Of course when a version is
first released, you don't know when it will become non-forward-
compatible.

So I guess the solution would be to provide an option to statically
link any libraries that lack a strict backward compatibility promise.
But that has its problems too (although possibly not so much in your
application).

I suspect you are asking for the impossible.