On Wed, Jan 10, 2001 at 01:57:38AM -0700, Bill Anderson wrote:

> > That's the nifty thing about the portage system--it takes care of
> > creating the packing list.

> say, that is nifty.

We think so too :)

> Hmm, excuse my newness to gentoo (not installed until I get the drive 
> backed up tomorrow or so (I hope)) ... but does this mean that hyphens 
> are not valid in an ebuild name?

Hyphens are valid, but ebuild has a special "version syntax" so that it can
parse the version numbers of a package and compare them.  Here are the basic
rules:

package names can have any number of hyphen-separated words, like so:

foo-bar-oni-ville (this is a valid package name)

then, to tag the version on it, you add another hyphen and a version string.
The version strings have a special format:

4.0.0 valid
4.0.1 valid
4.01.1109235.12350923.329832932.3232983 valid
4.01_alpha valid
4.02_alpha17 valid
7.1.3_beta valid
7.1.3.5_beta5 valid
(we support the _pre tag in the same way)
4.0a is valid

7.1.3-pre8 is *not* valid (should be 7.1.3_pre8)
4.0aa is *not* valid (we support revisions "a" through "z" -- a single character)
2.4.0-test10 is *not* valid (we don't support "test" just yet, and if we did the correct
format would be 2.4.0_test10)

OK, so that's the basic intro to the version string.  Then, there's an optional 
package "rev" that defaults to zero if you leave it off.  However, if you want to 
specify a "rev", you add a -r<revnum>.  So, a final package/version/rev name could
be something like:

foo-bar-oni-ville-4.0.3.1.34.4.3.3_alpha76-r12

Amazingly, Portage can parse this and determine if it's newer or older than
foo-bar-oni-ville-4.012323420.9393.3.3.3.3.3.232.5.3_alpha73-r11

However, we normally don't get that complicated.

> As compared to a prerelease test kernel?
> As someone who has been through many release cylces, I would have to 
> dosagree, if that is your position.
> 
> Justin
> As far as 'ac' those are Alan cox patched kernel. IME, they've been much 
> better than the standard kernel. Alan Cox is basically the second in 
> command in Linuxville, eventually the ac patches become merged (usually, 
> but not always).

The most important thing to us is *ReiserFS filesystem stability*.  We wait
until we can ensure that ReiserFS works well and doesn't dice up everyone's
files.  Right now, Achim is testing 2.4.0-ac3 with patches and making sure
it's stable.

-- 
Daniel Robbins					<drobbins@g.o>
President/CEO					http://www.gentoo.org 
Gentoo Technologies, Inc.