Subject: Re: Names for prerelease pkgs
To: Martin Husemann <martin@duskware.de>
From: Frederick Bruckman <fb@enteract.com>
List: tech-pkg
Date: 03/11/2001 04:19:31
On Sun, 11 Mar 2001, Martin Husemann wrote:

> It seems we are lacking some notation for prerelease packages. The case
> where I hit this is the sysutils/nut-ups packages. We currently have 0.44.2
> in tree, and I'd like to update to the 0.44.3 prerelease 5.
>
> Using nut-ups-0.44.3pre5 or nut-ups-0.44.3b5 would erroneously match
> dependecies like >=0.44.3.
>
> So, in this case there are no pkgs depending on this - but the general question
> remains: how should we name prerelease packages and should we add special code
> to handle this to the version matching code?

If there were packages that depend on this, you could make it
0.44.2.0.5, that being greater than 0.44.2 while less than 0.44.3.

If there are no other packages affected, it's my feeling that we
should follow the lead of the package's author/maintainer, calling it
by whatever name he's given to the distfile (0.44.3pre5 ?), no matter
how inconsistent, so that when someone tells him, "I'm having a
problem with version such-and-such on NetBSD," he'll know what they're
talking about, but that's only my opinion.


Frederick