How to deal with major versions? (was Re: [Zope3-dev] Re: egg version numbers and zope releases)

[Christian Theune]

Hi,

Am Mittwoch, den 30.05.2007, 15:30 -0400 schrieb Jim Fulton:
> >>
> >> Not as icky (IMHO) as having distribution names with embedded major
> >> version numbers.  I'm interested in other people's opinions here.
> >
> > I don't like version numbers encoded in package names. I consider this
> > to be a work-around for packaging systems that aren't rich enough.
> >
> > (Gentoo for example gets this right.)
> 
> Could you elaborate on this?

Aside the general version numbering, for me as a user gentoo provides
flags on packages marking them stable. I never get unstable/testing
packages that I don't want.

In addition, I can "mask" packages away giving version patterns like:

>3.4 

this would match all packages that are past 3.5.* but not 3.4.*.
I find that their patterns do what I want all the time, although I don't
know the specifics as well as Jodok.

(Side note: gentoo doesn't encode version numbers into packages but it
provides a mechanism to install packages that are compatible in
different versions in parallel. They call this technique 'slotting'.
That allows me to install python2.3, python2.4 and python2.5 in parallel
by specifying "please insteall python version 2.4.4 and python version
2.3.5" without having to encode the version number in the package)

However, I just realize that what I was referring to is a two-fold
mechanism which isn't working with the actual dependencies but is about
marking things as tested/stable within the distribution or not. Looks
like I confused those things. But their way of spelling "I don't want
things past the minor release 3.4" I like.

On a different note, couldn't the dependency "<=3.4.999" also be spelled
as "<3.5dev"? Can there be a smaller version number than "3.5dev" in the
3.5 series?

Christian

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