Re: Discussion about why GNU/Linux system upgrades cause old programs to break

> From: "Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide" <[email protected]>
> Cc: Jeremy Bryant <[email protected]>,  Eli Zaretskii <[email protected]>,
>   [email protected],  [email protected]
> Date: Wed, 12 Aug 2026 23:04:14 +0200
> 
> Arsen Arsenović <[email protected]> writes:
> 
> > This is because we're acting as integrators of said old Emacsen with
> > current software.
> >
> > Here's, for instance, our recipe for building Emacs 24:
> > https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/proj/emacs.git/tree/app-editors/emacs/emacs-24.5-r11.ebuild
> 
> This actually is great, because it references the patches used:
> 
> https://dev.gentoo.org/~ulm/emacs/emacs-24.5-patches-5.tar.xz
> 
> Would some of them be useful for Emacs upstream (i.e. for a new release
> of Emacs 24)?

If someone comes on board and takes the responsibility for releasing
tarballs of old Emacs version so that they can be compiled on recent
systems, I don't see why not.  Otherwise, we simply lack the manpower
for these jobs, because releasing a tarball doesn't only mean fixing
the sources so they compile, it also means testing the result to make
sure it works well enough for an official release.  It also means
agreeing to accept bug reports about old versions we no longer
actively develop.

The current situation, where the downstream distros do this job, is
not a bad one, but only for people who install from distros.  People
who build their own Emacs must solve these problems themselves.