Re: Unreleased libraries

[Andreas Beckmann <anbe@debian.org>]

On 2014-02-07 17:25, Pau Garcia i Quiles wrote:
> Is there a policy on how to package software that does not make releases?

You usually make up your own upstream version number, either
revision-based or date-based or both. Just ensure you use a version that
sorts before any later upstream release. Not having looked at skia at
all, I would suggest using as upstream version

0~svn12345  (if you tarred up revision 12345)
0~svn2014.02.07  (if you tarred up a snapshot today)
0~svn2014.02.07.r12345  (both)

or whatever you like. Note that the "0~" prefix will sort before e.g.
0.1 (or 0.0.0.0.1 or whatever), just in case upstream makes a release
some day, so you don't get into trouble having a "later" version in
Debian already.

And if upstream already did a release (or plans to) you would do
something like this to package a snapshot:

1.2.3+svn45678  (if the last upstream release was 1.2.3)
1.2.3~~svn45678  (if the last release was 1.2.2 and what you are
packaging is more like a pre-alpha-release candidate of 1.2.3 than a
followup to 1.2.2, note the double tilde '~~', this will allow you to
package 1.2.3~rc4 later on if upstream makes that available and finally
1.2.3 as the final release.

Start the debian revision with '-1' as usual.


If your upstream is git, you don't have monotonically increasing
revision numbers, but (unordered) commit hashes. I usually use something
based on 'git describe' as that gives you a number of commits since a
reference tag in addition to a release.

E.g. git describe returns 0.56-24-gffe37cd which is
<tag>-<number_of_commits_since_tag>-g<shortened_hash_of_HEAD>
and I would version the snapshot as 0.56+git24-gffe37cd.


Andreas