The debian-private mailing list leak, part 1. Volunteers have complained about Blackmail. Lynchings. Character assassination. Defamation. Cyberbullying. Volunteers who gave many years of their lives are picked out at random for cruel social experiments. The former DPL's girlfriend Molly de Blanc is given volunteers to experiment on for her crazy talks. These volunteers never consented to be used like lab rats. We don't either. debian-private can no longer be a safe space for the cabal. Let these monsters have nowhere to hide. Volunteers are not disposable. We stand with the victims.

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: on versions, revisions, and release dates



Bruce Perens writes ("on versions, revisions, and release dates"):
> There's been a lot of talk about the version field and the revision field.
> I think we would all have been able to agree on them long ago, but we are
> trying to make a bad design work. Here's a proposal to change that design.
> 
> I propose that the "Version: " field should be informational only, and
> should not be parsed or compared. And when that's the case, there isn't a
> real need for a separate revision field.
> 
> Instead, each package should contain a "Release-Date: " field, which would
> be a GMT date and time. This should be the only key by which packages are
> compared to other versions of the same package. Obviously, this key can be
> sorted reliably.

I don't think this is necessary.  All it does is add extra complexity,
and it also decouples what the user sees (the version) from the thing
that the computer looks at (the date).

The versions we have at the moment sort reliably, with no mangling of
the upstream maintainer's version number in almost all cases.  The
cases that dpkg gets wrong (using its simple algorithm) are the ones
that humans tend to have trouble with too.

Note also that if we change this we have to change the semantics of
all the dependency fields that mention specific revisions, and it's
also hard for us to issue a an emergency bugfix to an older and very
different version without messing up the ordering.

This is, I think, separate from issues to do with parsing package
filenames.

Ian.