On Mon, Sep 27, 2004 at 05:52:05PM -0700, Vagrant Cascadian wrote: > > > making packages that are versioned identically to the official debian > > > packages seems like a really bad idea- it can become very difficult to > > > install some non-ubuntu package, since ubuntu only supports a sub-set of > > > debian packages... > > I'm not sure what other versioning scheme you would expect them to use. > > Anyone maintaining packages outside of the Debian archive is going to > > have to deal with the possibility of incompatibilites between their > > packages and the Debian packages; Ubuntu is just being up front about > > this fact. > what i've read regarding backported packages suggests altering the > version of the package name, so that it's clear where the package came > from. for example: > foo might be versioned as 1.9.3-3 in official debian, and ubuntu's > modified version might be version 1.9.3-3.ubuntu.0 or something like > that. > it's not flawless(foo 1.9.3-3.1 might update and override > ubuntu-specific stuff), but at least you can tell what's what. > might be a pain if they have to do that with *lots* of packages. i > don't have any idea how many they're building on their own. but it > makes it much easier to actually determine what is ubuntu and what is > official debian, and easier to maintain compatibility. It does give you a clearer indication of the source of any individual package, but what it doesn't give you is any sort of automated approach to compatibly merging packages from the two sources: even if version numbers are distinguished, they'll still be interleaved when sorting, which means any package declaring a versioned relationship (depends/conflicts) with a package that has both a Debian and an Ubuntu fork will not be able to rely on that version number meaning what they think it means in a mixed package environment. So, using distinguishing version numbers seems to make sense, but the benefits for someone releasing a complete Debian-based distro where they've touched every package may not actually be worth the effort, so it's not something I'm too concerned about. -- Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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