Re: Versioning unversioned packages

[Marc Espie <espie%nerim.net@localhost>]

It will probably suffer from NIH syndrom, as usual, but we have a full
nice set of version suffixes/prefixes in the OpenBSD package system that
hasn't failed us so far.

Over the years, everything got moved into the pkg tools proper.

It's documented in packages-specs, basically, for upstream, we do
dot matches (dewey notation) plus the following suffixes:
rc[N], beta[N], pre[N], pl[N].

beta is oldest (before the release), pre and rc are more or less synonymous
(and also come before the release), pl comes *after* the release.

The OpenBSD package system proper makes use of REVISION, and EPOCH, these
are encoded as p[N]v[N] (possibly empty).

- p[N] is used for patches.
- v[n] is the infamous EPOCH, which basically resets *everything else*, e.g.,

anything v1  is more recent than anything v0  which is more recent than
anything without an EPOCH marker.


Whatever you change in NetBSD, please consider not reinventing something
different.   We haven't found a need to deviate from that scheme since 2010.

The only slightly annoying part is EPOCH: once set, it can never ever be
reset... not really such a big bother in real life.