> There's really no reasonable way to support versions of emacs older than
> 24 with the elpa based infrastructure. Indeed most emacs addon packages
> just won't work, never mind packaging issues. I guess a versioned depend
> on emacs would do the trick to pull in emacs24. If that seems like the
> right solution, I can have dh-elpa do it automatically.
That does indeed seem to me like the right solution.
However, I'd think it should be *possible* to install elpa- packages
without having emacs installed at all. They might not be very useful,
but so be it. This would argue for a "Recommends:" dependency. And
also an "Enhances:". And it would give dpkg a bit more freedom.
The current bug is somewhat deeper. If the elpa infrastructure can't
handle emacs (< 24), then it probably shouldn't try to use it. This
situation could come up if both emacs23 and emacs24 are installed, say,
with update-alternatives set to point to emacs23. So even an explicit
dependency on emacs24 won't completely address the issue. I think these
considerations argue for explicit version testing, or careful feature
testing, in the installation scripts. Although maybe dh-elpa (>= 0.13)
is already doing this?
(I suppose this discussion should really be moved to debian-emacsen.)
--Barak.
