Subject: bug#12536: 24.2.50; Outdated emacs22 icons in repo

From: Glenn Morris <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 28 Sep 2012 20:46:59 -0400

Marcin Antczak wrote:

> And then rename remaining emacs.png icons to emacs24.png.
>
> But this would also require to change icon name in emacs.desktop file.
>
> In Debian packages, these (emacs.png) icons are renamed with debian/rules
> and then debian uses it's alternatives system to set emacs24
> icons as current Emacs icons (if emacs24 is the most recent installed).

It would not be appropriate for Emacs to rename the icons to "emacs24",
because Emacs does not install itself under the name "emacs24". That is
a Debian thing. I don't think eg Fedora does that (?), they just provide
"emacs" packages.

Also, in the same way, when Emacs was Emacs 22, the icons were called
just "emacs", not "emacs22", so there is no name clash in terms of files
distributed by Emacs. I suppose the emacs22 icons could be renamed to
emacs_old. They were provided for people who preferred the older icon
style, buy I wonder if anyone has ever actually used them, so maybe they
should just go...

Maybe to do this properly the icons and desktop file should obey
configure's --program-transform-name option?

The rest is just idle speculation:

I wonder if there is much value in providing emacs23 and emacs24 packages.
Emacs 23 is not supported upstream any more. If you don't want a newer
version you can just not upgrade it. How many other Debian packages are
provided in "versioned" form? Eg I can't install iceweasel-10 and
iceweasel-15, just iceweasel. How did Emacs end up in this state? We do
try quite hard to ensure new releases are stable...