discussion on package-version numbers... (PR 56961)

[Garance A Drosihn]

At 11:07 AM -0500 5/12/04, Jacques A. Vidrine wrote:
>On Fri, May 07, 2004, Garance A Drosihn wrote:
>
>>  Alternate idea for
>>  handling versions:
>>
>>   <portversion> -> *our* idea of the version of the sources
>>                    for this port.
>
>That's what we have today.

Well, what we have today is an attempt to map the original
source version to something we think we can use.

>  >                   Make it a date string.
>>                    [personal twist on that idea: make the month
>>                    a letter from A-L, instead of 01-12]
>
>Our current scheme (as well as my strawman) preserves more
>of the original version.  This is aesthetically pleasing.

My suggestion would still leave the original version for
viewing purposes, but just not use it for any automatic
processing.  I think a case could also be made that it
would be aesthetically pleasing if all our ports used a
single, simple, consistent format for the version of our
port of various original programs.  Here we go through the
trouble of coming up with some mapping-function, but no
matter how good we do at that we always end up with using
the port-epoch "fudge factor", because there is no mapping
function that will consistently work right.

>  > . . . . . . or was my initial premise not fair to say?   :-)
>
>Your premise was fair enough.  I guess there is desire to keep
>the differences between the original package version and our
>${PORTVERSION} small.  Otherwise, we could just forget the
>whole mess and use ${PORTEPOCH} only :-)

Well, that's basically my suggestion, except that we keep the
port-version around for human-display purposes...

Ah well.  It was just a suggestion.  Cheers.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad at gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad at freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih at rpi.edu