Re: handling versioning change

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

Now we'll go onto the ramifications of using ':' for the binary
packages we create, and in pkgsrc in general:

a) we now need to to have a ':' character in some package names, and
not in others
b) how do we deal with having a ':' character when performing
pre-requisite parsing in pkgsrc makefiles? (the ':' character is
already used there, for different purposes)
c) interix support with a ':' character in the name? "Yeah, right"

Oh, oh, oh, I know, it's just a ':' character, change it to something
else. Right, so let's use a ',' character, which is visually
indistinguishable from '.' in some typefaces with a small font size.
Oh, yes, not ',', we'll use '#', no ';', '|', no, '/', something else.

All in all, you fairly quickly come round to the fact that calling the
package something else is the least intrusive way of dealing with
this. After all, it's what we do IRL when describing things

A. "I got a new iphone today"
B. "6 or 7?"
A. "7. iphone7"

Given that there should be no RTT in our own parsing of the package
name, we need to distinguish, a priori, between packages. So we have
kde2, kde3, kde4. py27, py33, etc. In doing so, the version is
embedded in the metadata, in the package name itself, and we're
instantly aware of context. And it's why any form of epoch-type
event-denotation is awkward at best, irrelevant and detrimental to
understanding at worst, and certainly doesn't help in any way.

On 27 November 2016 at 15:35, Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg%bec.de@localhost> wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 27, 2016 at 07:07:08PM +0100, Kamil Rytarowski wrote:
>> PKGEPOCH mechanism would solve it now and add a proper tool in future,
>> adding incremental version prepending PKGVERSION, PKGEPOCH 1 would form
>> a version like 1:1.0.3, that will be always higher than any version with
>> the default PKGEPOCH 0.
>
> As I said before, it doesn't really provide any significant advance over
> the example I just gave. Given all the pain the incompatiblity would
> introduce, I don't really see the point. There are better use cases for
> ':' as meta character too.
>
> Joerg
>