Re: [PATCH] Specify policy for use of revision IDs in version numbers
On Sun, 01 May 2011, Bill Allombert wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 30, 2011 at 09:00:14PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> > So the reason for imposing a length restriction on version numbers in
> > particular is due to the UI display of aptitude? I'm a bit dubious that
> > this is a good justification for a Policy rule. dpkg -l has truncated
> > version numbers for forever at 14 characters, and I don't recall this
> > being a major issue in the past. The thing that started off this thread,
> > I thought, was the constraint on file name length in ISO images, which is
> > the total length and doesn't impose a constraint specifically on the
> > version.
>
> Also there are no technical requirement for packages filenames in ISO images to be
> canonical packages names. Packages filename can be mangled to fit the medium, there
> is a program 'dpkg-name' to recover the canonical packages name. This requires
> the same mangling to be applied to the filenames in the Packages files, but this
> not an issue since the Packages file is in the same medium.
That could work, but I can certainly imagine non-uniqueness causing
problems. .debs from inside a CD/DVD have this nasty tendency to show up in
the most strange places. They don't stay put in that DVD/CD and get
destroyed at the next point release.
And it would cause problems for some tools, too. Assuming such package name
reduction can be made to work safely, the question is: what would be the
better solution in the long term?
--
"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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