On 24/12/2021 21:29, Ihor Radchenko wrote:
Hmm. What about just building Emacs from source? Newer Emacs can usually be compiled without a need to install super-new toolchain. You may not need to update the whole Debian (which can indeed be a nightmare) just to get newer Emacs.
Current Debian stable bullseye has Emacs-27.1, for oldstable the same version is available from buster-backports repository (I have not tried it though) https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=emacs
Debian supports upgrades between stable releases for more than 20 years. Problems may originate from third-party repositories or e.g. when binary format of some tool changes (e.g. PostGIS plugin for PostgreSQL). Certainly support of some legacy hardware may be dropped in new release. Manual actions during upgrade may be required but I would not call it nightmare.
