python-docutils overrides rst.el included in Emacs 23 with older version

[Martin Soto]

Binary package hint: python-docutils

python-docutils contains the file /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/rst.el, which implements an Emacs mode for editing ReStructuredText. However, starting with version 23 of Emacs, this mode is now part of the editor (file /usr/share/emacs/23.1/lisp/textmodes/rst.elc in package emacs-common). Unfortunately, the version of rst.el delivered with python-docutils is much older than the version included with emacs, and overrides it, which is of course undesirable. python-docutils should stop including this file, or at least set things up in such a way that Emacs 23 doesn't load it.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.04
Package: python-docutils 0.6-3
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.32-19.28-generic 2.6.32.10+drm33.1
Uname: Linux 2.6.32-19-generic i686
Architecture: i386
Date: Wed Apr 7 14:35:19 2010
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_ZW:en
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_ZW.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: python-docutils

[Jakub Wilk (jwilk)]

* Martin Soto <email address hidden>, 2010-04-07, 12:47:
>python-docutils contains the file /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/rst.el,
>which implements an Emacs mode for editing ReStructuredText. However,
>starting with version 23 of Emacs, this mode is now part of the editor
>(file /usr/share/emacs/23.1/lisp/textmodes/rst.elc in package emacs-
>common). Unfortunately, the version of rst.el delivered with python-
>docutils is much older than the version included with emacs, and
>overrides it, which is of course undesirable.

Newer != better.

While I agree that having two copies of rst.el is suboptimal, simply
dropping rst.el from python-docutils is currently not a viable solution.

--
Jakub Wilk

[Martin Soto (soto255)]

Of course, newer is not always better in the general case; in this case, however, I would claim it is. This is the version of rst.el that is included with Emacs, which means it has the blessing of the Emacs developers. For this reason, I would also expect it to have been actively tested together with Emacs 23, which may or may not be the case for the older version in python-docutils. Suboptimality isn't my problem either: I wouldn't mind having two versions of the file in my system, as long as Emacs picks up the right version, which is not what it's doing right now.

[dino99 (9d9)]

There is no support on such deprecated version; that one has died long time ago.