Re: 2008Q1 -> current: downgrade

[Alistair Crooks <agc%pkgsrc.org@localhost>]

On Mon, May 05, 2008 at 02:10:27PM +0200, Alan Barrett wrote:
> On Mon, 05 May 2008, Aleksey Cheusov wrote:
> > PKGPATH           PKGBASE      PKGSRC-2008Q1 HEAD
> > --------------------------------------------------
> > devel/stgit       stgit        20080220     0.14.2
> > devel/python-mode python-mode  4.54nb1      1.0
> > 
> > As far as I understand such situations should not appear.
> > I think this is a bug.
> 
> FreeBSD addressed this by adding an "epoch" counter, which starts off
> being undefined, but gets incremented whenever the package numbering
> goes backwards.  In the printable version of a package version, it's
> an extra number at the end, delimited by a comma.  In version number
> comparisons, it has a higher priority than the rest of the number.
> 
> For example, instead of going from "stgit-20080220" to "stgit-0.14.2"
> one could go to "stgit-0.14.2,1", where the trailing ",1" means
> "numbering has gone backwards once".

We don't have the means to do that right now, and retrofitting it onto
the ordering mechanism which we use right across pkgsrc would not be
easy, simple or even desired (I don't know what the ,1 is meant to
signify, even with your excellent explanation, and I don't see how
this ordering even works).  I'd be more inclined to use a different
PKGBASE for the affected packages.

Regards,
Alistair