Re: Version to use in package for a program with non standard versioning
> You have sorted out the licence problems with qd? It's currently in
contrib.
What license problem whould that be?
Dick Howell, the original author, explicitly says on his website:
"This is free software; you can distribute it and/or modify it under the
terms of the GNU Public License. There is no warranty. If it breaks, as
they say, you get to keep the pieces."
http://linuxminded.xs4all.nl/mirror/www.boston.quik.com/rph/fah.html
I think that the problem could be that in the kfolding source there was no
mention of the qd license, but Dick Howell released all his tools under
the GPL, so I don't think that would be a problem. Or am I not aware of
something?
>
>> Now for the problem I'm dealing with. qd doesn't use traditional
versioning, it uses two values for it's version.
>
> But that's internal versioning really - you could absorb that into your
Debian
> versioning if you don't mind incrementing the Debian version each time
the internal versions change. Just increment the minor version number
each time
> the qdinfo version changes. How often does that happen?
As I said, one time there are a few updates in one week, sometimes even
multiple updates on one day, although those are rare. Usually there are
one or two updates in one month, other times there are no update for a
whole month or more.
I don't mind incrementing the Debian version, I would prefer that
actually. To keep the Debian version in sync with the "legacy" version of
qd, which all its users are used to.
>> If I look at Section 2.3 of the New Maintainers Guide, it says I should
use whatever non-standard versioning is used prefixed with "0.0.".
>
> That's for a completely new package, this has some history in Debian so I'd
> say it's best to start at the previous version and increment that.
OK. I'll use the existing qd as a startpoint than, thanks.
>> Currently I have qd-0.0.033, qdinfo-0.0.20051226 and qdiprint-0.0.3.
qdiprint doesn't have any versioning whatsoever, therefor I now keep my
own in the traditional x.y.z format.
>
> I may be wrong but I'd suggest a debian changelog entry of 2.0.0-1,
creating
> qd_2.0.0-1_i386.deb etc.
This would mean that the Debian version of qd is completely separate from
the internal and the one its users are used to.
Currently the Debian package for qd uses the version of kfolding as the
Debian package version. I think this is wrong, and would prefer to do this
differently. But if the 1.0.0 version in the .deb is significant, I'll
continue from there.
> Depends how much qd has changed since it was last uploaded as part of
kfolding. 1.1.0-1 may be suitable.
Not much has changed, there have been 3 updates to qd by Dick Howell since
the version which is in Debian. Mostly tiny bugfixes, but a few features
have been added since then too. The Operating System in the queue.dat can
now be decoded, and a different output format is now also available. I've
also fixed a 3 bugs since Dick Howells last release.
Regards,
Bas
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