emacs package is version 23 but depends on the older version emacs22

Binary package hint: emacs

Summary: the "emacs" metapackage has a confusing version number, and some users expect it to pull in emacs23 rather than emacs22. In particular, packages which depend on the "emacs" metapackage will pull in emacs22 even if emacs23 is already installed. Perhaps the description of the "emacs" package should be clearer about its being a metapackage, and perhaps point to information about main vs. universe.

Original description follows.

After installation of Ubuntu 9.10RC, I installed emacs23 package but not emacs package, and was additionally going to install w3m-el-snapshot package which depends on emacs package. However, I stopped installing w3m-el-snapshot because emacs package required to install emacs22 package by its dependencies:

$ sudo apt-get install w3m-el-snapshot
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
  apel emacs emacs22-bin-common emacs22-common emacs22-gtk flim metamail sharutils
Suggested packages:
  emacs22-el semi wl wl-beta mule-ucs imagemagick wv xlhtml ppthtml libmoe1.5 namazu2
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  apel emacs emacs22-bin-common emacs22-common emacs22-gtk flim metamail sharutils w3m-el-snapshot
0 upgraded, 9 newly installed, 0 to remove and 42 not upgraded.
Need to get 22.3MB of archives.
After this operation, 71.5MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? n
Abort.

It seems as if the installation candidate of emacs package is the latest version 23, but this package strangely depends on the older version 22:

$ apt-cache policy emacs
emacs:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: 23.1+1-4ubuntu2+22.2+0ubuntu6
  Version table:
     23.1+1-4ubuntu2+22.2+0ubuntu6 0
        500 http://jp.archive.ubuntu.com karmic/main Packages
$ apt-cache depends emacs
emacs
 |Depends: emacs22-gtk
 |Depends: emacs22
    emacs22-gtk
    emacs22-nox
  Depends: emacs22-nox

emacs package is described as follows:

Description: The GNU Emacs editor (metapackage)
 GNU Emacs is the extensible self-documenting text editor.
 This is a metapackage which will always depend on the latest Emacs
 release.

I have read Bug #433397 and understand why emacs22 is installed prior to emacs23. But I think the version number of emacs package and this package description are very confusing.