As the maintainer of Debian's w3 packages, I'm currently
contemplating packaging w3 for Emacs 21, so that we'd have
w3-el-e20 and w3-el-e21 packages. But there are several options.
The viable choices I've come up with so far are as follows:
1. Add minimal patches to Debian's existing w3 in order
to make it compatible with Emacs 20 and Emacs 21.
2. Package the w3 CVS. This has a dependency on Gnus 5.8
or later, which is included in Emacs 21 but not in
Debian's Emacs 20 without the `gnus' package, so there
would be some subchoices:
2a. w3-el-e20 would Depend: on `gnus'. This
could potentially irritate people who don't
want a newer version of Gnus.
2b. w3-el-e20 would be the same old w3, not from
CVS. This would undoubtedly irritate people
who wanted newer versions of w3.
2c. We could have two packages for Emacs 20, one
of 4.0pre.46, one of the CVS. I don't want
to do this.
My preference is for 2a, followed by 2b. Choice 1 is not a great
idea because it means we'll continue to fall farther behind in
the w3 version we've got packaged, and 2c is worse because it
adds confusing choices to the package system and will undoubtedly
be difficult to maintain.
Speak up now if you've got a strong preference, please. If I
don't get any input in a week or so, I'll go with 2a.
--
"GNU does not eliminate all the world's problems,
only some of them."
--Richard Stallman
