Re: Versioning unversioned packages

[Thomas Klausner <wiz%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

On Fri, Jun 10, 2016 at 01:13:07PM +0100, Gavan Fantom wrote:
> Occasionally we have packages which are not derived from a specific release
> upstream. Sometimes because the last release was a long time ago and a
> newer, unreleased, version is needed to do anything useful, and sometimes
> because upstream simply hasn't ever made releases and just expects people to
> use the latest version from github.
> 
> But in pkgsrc we need a version number for every package. How do we derive
> this version number in the case of packages where the author has not
> supplied a version number, and we are just stating a revision in github or
> similar?
> 
> Do we:
> 
> * Make up a version number such as pkgname-0.0
>   - In this case there is the potential that it will clash with a version
> released by upstream in the future.
>   - This may be a bit easier when a previous version has been released, but
> we need something newer even than that. Perhaps then pkgname-1.2b and hope
> that the next official release will be pkgname-1.3.
>
> * Use the date of the last checkin, such as pkgname-20160610
>   - What do we then do if upstream makes a formal release? How will version
> comparisons be affected if we switch from this format to pkgname-1.0?

Lately I've been mostly using a mixture of these two:
pkgname-0.0.20160610

Usually upstreams release version numbers >=0.1 which should then be
newer than the pkgsrc version and fine.
 Thomas