Why is this Emacs package versioned at 46.1? 26 is the highest possible major version today
There are many issues and questions here, so I'll be brief but try to cover them all.
emacs
is just a meta-package that points at the latest version ofemacs...
in Ubuntu (currentlyemacs24
). The "46.1" is just a package version, deliberately high to displace older emacs packages. Seeapt show emacs
for a bit more info.-
You're overriding that
emacs
package with a lower version number package. Ubuntu prioritises the package version installed by version number. The highest will be the one that gets installed (when installing or upgrading), hence yours is constantly guzzumped.You can see this in the
apt-cache policy emacs
output. The candidate is the higher version. You can work around priorities with pinning, or fudging your version number (something higher than 46.1) but that does rather ignore the problem (and may leave a
emacs24
package in place).Your best option is removing the
emacs
package and just building and installing aemacs25
oremacs26
package instead. You could also build an emacs meta-package that depended on your version-in-name package, but that's just a vanity. I wouldn't do that unless you're planning on distributing.Regarding Ubuntu doing stuff without "without asking", check to see if automatic updates are turned on. Getting the latest available to it is the default behaviour so I think this is more a case of "not understanding what Ubuntu does" rather than a ghost in the machine, or worse.
-
And as for "why version 24, not 25 or 26?", Ubuntu and Debian beneath it both aim for stable, tested software versions. 26 is still in development and 25 didn't come out until September 2016.
Additionally, Ubuntu isn't a rolling-release so versions of Ubuntu with 24 will stay on version 24 for the lifespan of those Ubuntu releases (unless something really crazy happens). Security patches will be backported and applied if necessary but it'll still be 24.