Package: emacs
Version: 1:28.2+1-15
Severity: normal
X-Debbugs-Cc: Xiyue Deng <[email protected]>
Control: affects modus-themes

Arguably modus-themes and leuven-theme are different than the other
built-in themes, because they have an ELPA counterpart; however, this
is why they need to be tracked like any other elpa-foo Debian
packages.

I first became aware of this issue (see Bug#1037135) during bookworm,
and I confirmed it's still a problem in trixie and forky at the time
I'm filing this bug.  It's the same class of elpa-foo package is
behind the built-in version, masks it, and causes breakage.  The
specific case I'm looking at is modus-themes (although leuven-theme is
also affected).

/usr/share/emacs/*/etc/themes/modus-themes.el has everything needed
for dh-elpa to generate modus-themes-pkg.el, and if upstream doesn't
want to start treating it as a built-in then we need to do the
system-integration work of limiting breakage.

Because upstream doesn't generate a modus-themes-pkg.el, Emacs doesn't
count it built-in package.  Upstream can argue that they don't need to
track themes, because:

  1. The user uses the built-in copy
  OR
  2. The user automatically receives updates from ELPA, which is
  enabled by default, and thus the packaged version is always newer
  than the built-in copy that isn't tracked as a built-in package.
  
Thus, they are able to somewhat reasonably maintain that it's
out-of-scope for them on practical grounds.  Unfortunately, that
limited scope causes problems in Debian with modus-themes, as well as
a future leuven-theme.

Please forward this bug to them, and if this isn't fixed upstream,
please use dh-elpa to generate foo-theme-pkg.el data for themes that
provide the necessary metadata.  Here is a simple heuristic to find
affected themes, because presumably there will be more in the future:

  grep Version /usr/share/emacs/*/etc/themes/*

Regards,
Nicholas

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