[13121] in Athena Bugs
No emacs-VERSION file
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Hawkinson)
Wed Jan 25 04:23:29 1995
Date: Wed, 25 Jan 1995 04:23:17 -0500
To: bugs@MIT.EDU
Cc: emacsdev@MIT.EDU, bug-gnuemacs@MIT.EDU
From: John Hawkinson <jhawk@MIT.EDU>
This "bug" exists for all three supported Athena platforms.
In general, when emacs is installed, it attempts to install two files,
hard linked to each other:
emacs
and emacs-VERSION
For instance:
emacs -OR- emacs
and emacs-18.59 ---- and emacs-19.25
This is useful if, for some reason (:-)), a user has multiple emacsen
referenced within his/her PATH, and would like to unambiguously
specifiy one or the other.
It's also a neat way to tell what version a particular emacs binary is
without strings-ing it.
Lastly, it's a convention :-). I should point out that it useful to
have an ``emacs19'' link, and that should stay, too. It's unfortunate
(IMHO) that this wasn't called ``emacs-19'', but oh-well...
I should note that the emacs binaries in the emacs 19 locker seem to
somehow be installed with names such as emacs-19.25.92, which seems to
be contrary to both common sense (the third set of numbers is the
build-version, i.e. the number of times the maintainer has typed
``make'' in the build directory) as well as contrary to the Makefile
as I read it, and contrary to my experience when I've installed emacs
in the past. Hmm...
--jhawk
