Andy Piper <andy(a)xemacs.org&gt; writes: The practical reason is that the patch I made that turns beta labels into patch levels reuses the beta code and we do this for beta versions. Whether you actually want that this depends on whether you want to have people have multiple 21.1.x versions installed, we allowed this for the older versions (when we didn't have patch levels), so why not now? On the other hand, I am not sure many people actually use this feature. Most installations I have seen create a separate hierarchy for each version and have /usr/local symlink to that. Jan