Re: Versioned package name change?

[Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost>]

Wow, that's quite the saga.

Please adjust the DESCR files so that someone who thinks they want
appletalk and has no clue about any of this will at least get the
1-sentence summary clue about pre-darwin.  It sounds like if you are
using appletalk only on Darwin-based macs, you want netatalk3, and if
you have any pre-Darwin ones, you need netatalk22.

Basically I think it's always a bug when there are multiple versions of
something that have the same or essentially the same DESCR, and I have
tried to add a final paragraph that says "This is the old version and
[why you might need it." vs "This is the current stable version." to
packages when I actually understand about them, sometimes if only as
note to future self.  There is a lot of this dup-DESCR in pkgsrc.

"Hauke Fath (SPG)" <hf%spg.tu-darmstadt.de@localhost> writes:

>>    Take this as a lesson that when naming a package for a version, to
>>    think about the likely trajectory of versions and what does and does
>>    not need to be versioned.
>
> At the time, my crystal ball was away for re-polishing, and there was
> virtually no perspective for another Netatalk 2 release.  ;)
>
> "netatalk-ddp" might have been a better package name, yes.

Indeed, this is super hard.  I didn't mean to be critical, and sorry it
came across that way.  It was just striking me that with this particular
hindsight, that there might be minor releases of old branches following
a big change to a new branch (which by definition removes stuff or is
incompatible, since otherwise we wouldn't want to have the old one).
This leads to naming packages with as small a component of the version
number as possible.  Of course that's probably wrong for other things
that happen....

>>    The real bug is that upstreams should be good
>>    enough about compatibility that there is essentially no desire to have
>>    multiple versions of a pacakge in the first place.
>
> Upstream "moving forward" deprecated a feature that enough people
> found they still wanted. In hindsight, that was premature, yes.

Not just hindsight, in that someone (you?) thought it necessary to add
netatalk22 at the time.  So this "break the package so that a
non-trivial number of people want to run the old one" was true at the time.

> Bottom line: As a regular user of pkg_rolling-replace, I'll just stick
> with "netatalk22".

I do not think that's really going to confuse anyone, especially if
DESCR says

This packages contains the 2.x branch of netatalk, which has [ddp
support for pre-Darwin].  It exists because that support was removed in
netatalk 3.

and netatalk says

See also netatalk22 which, is more compatible wiht pre-Darwin systems.

or something like that.