Versioning scheme for package branches, Was: Mysterious NMU (Bug #423455)

[Reinhard Tartler <siretart@debian.org>]

Goswin von Brederlow <brederlo@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de> writes:

> I suggested 1.2-3+s.lenny.1 in the past. More specifically:
>
> 1.2-3+a0... for local/vendor recompiles without source changes.
> 1.2-3+bX    for binary NMU
> 1.2-3+c0... for local/vendor changes with source changes
> 1.2-3+s...  for security updates
>
> So for example an ubuntu patched package of foo would be
> 1.2-3+c0.ubunt.

The versioning for local/vendor changes doesn't seem to fit here. If you
have local changes, then you most probably don't want those change to be
overriden by a security upload, which is much more near to the version
1.2-3. Instead, you want to merge your local changes with the changes
introduced with the security upload.

Your proposed naming scheme does not address the problem of merging
local and distro (e.g. security or other 'upstream') changes at all, and
is therefore not (yet) usable in the ubuntu context.

What would help here is to introduce the concept of package branches,
and provide means to assist merging changes in different branches of the
same package.

-- 
Gruesse/greetings,
Reinhard Tartler, KeyID 945348A4