Re: strange emacs 21.4 on ftp.gnu.org:/pub/gnu/emacs

[David Kastrup]

[Following up to myself]

David Kastrup <address@hidden> writes:

> Answering the question is of secondary interest to answering the
> question how to deal with it.  Personally, I'd like renaming this
> thing to 21.3a even though Kim has already stated he considers it
> unlikely that this might be a good idea/possible after the fact has
> been established.

[...]

> Given that, I recommend that we bother about what lies within our
> power, namely editing Emacs, as releasing it is not under our control.
> I propose that we now, where another renaming of everything has
> seemingly become necessary, decide to call the next major release
> 22.0, and also fix all corresponding documentation and :version
> strings (which are now completely fouled up) to refer to 22.0 instead.
>
> This will prevent
> a) us having to change all version strings again for the next major
> release more than once,
> b) us and third part package providers from looking like utter idiots
> when talking about release numbers, in case another security fix
> intervenes, invalidating all previously made statements and assurances
> again.

To underline that we would want to avoid having to do such a step
again, try a google search for "Emacs-21.4 -X-Emacs-21.4".  That are
about 8430 pages/articles talking about Emacs-21.4.  It is a safe bet
that at this point of time, pretty much none of them is talking about
what has been released as 21.4 by now.

Anybody volunteering for writing to the maintainers of those web pages
and articles?  I am still not convinced that the 21.3a idea would not
be less painful in the long run, even though at the moment there exist
signed, though unannounced, 21.4 Emacs packages.

But again: it's not our call to make.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum