Re: limits for package name and version (MBF alert: ... .deb filenames)
On Sun, 24 Apr 2011, Moritz Mühlenhoff wrote:
> ["Followup-To:" nach gmane.linux.debian.devel.general gesetzt.]
> Philipp Kern <trash@philkern.de> schrieb:
> > ["Followup-To:" header set to gmane.linux.debian.devel.general.]
> > On 2011-04-23, Dominic Hargreaves <dom@earth.li> wrote:
> >> On Sat, Apr 23, 2011 at 03:06:39PM +0100, Ben Hutchings wrote:
> >>> I would like to see policy forbid the use of commit hashes in versions.
> >>> They aren't ordered,
> >> This seems like an odd reason to forbid them; should one also
> >> forbid strings such as 'pre', 'rc', 'lenny', 'squeeze' in version
> >> numbers also because they aren't ordered? Clearly they should only be
> >> used some way towards the right-hand end of the version number, with
> >> appropriate additional ordering hints before them, so that no
> >> false ordering is inferred, but that's a very different matter.
> >
> > Given that wheezy will probably be the last version that's strictly
> > greater than lenny and squeeze we should switch to Debian version
> > numbers in the version instead of codenames post-squeeze.
> > (OTOH it needs to be greater than +squeeze then, so +debXY won't do.)
>
> Maybe +rXY as in r for release?
And that's why you forbid this kind of stuff in policy. People simply don't
have the required foresight, so now they have to "complain" that policy is
incorrectly forbidding them from screwing up, and you have a chance to point
them to the shortcomings of non-ordered version components:
1. They're unordered, but will be used as ordered. Thus, thet have the
potential of being actively harmful, and you will often lack the foresight
to know the trouble they could cause, so simply DON'T do that.
2. They increase the size of the version component for no great effect
(since they're unordered in the first place). Thus, they're actively
harmful if someone has to extend the version string for any reason and
you're anywhere beyond 15 or so characters already.
--
"One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
Henrique Holschuh
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