Comment 5 for bug 355086

>> Also, I'm looking for Wesnoth, when I start it with old saved games, to
>> say "You have old saved games. Sorry you can't play them. You need to
>> downgrade to 1.4" or another helpful message, rather than just pretend
>> that they aren't there. I would hope that's not too big a patch. I agree
>> that's a bug for upstream rather than the Debian or Ubuntu maintainer,
>> though.
>
>That's because historically it was stored in ~/.wesnoth and is now
>stored in ~/.wesnoth1.6. I am not exactly sure what the need for the
>switch was but I expect that upstream does have a reason for this
>approach - I rather not like to patch the configdir path to be different
>without knowing the rationale behind that and divert from how its done
>everywhere else.

This was just to solved the problem that average user would have old userdata/saves after upgrade which would then cause many problems in the new stable release. So directory name change was made to prevent users from shooting their own leg because they aren't excepted to know all the details about userdata directory.

@rhonda: How about making wesnoth packages install wesnothX.Y directory so users could have multiple stable versions installed same time. This would help transition period when the new stable version hits distros. Then you would need wesnoth meta packages that depend on the latest wesnoth packages with version in the package names.

I think that wouls just require a few path changes and extra packages build. But of course larger question is if debian or ubuntu would accept that kind of change.