Re: [gentoo-portage-dev] Current portage well designed, but badly used

[Ed Grimm]

On Sat, 27 Nov 2004, Gustavo Barbieri wrote:

> Some packages use numbering version padded with zero, that's good to
> list with shell functions, but it's bad because you can't change them
> to numbers and them back to string. For example:
> mail-mta/nullmailer-1.00_rc7-r4. If you Convert it to integers, it
> becomes 1.0 and you can't map back to the ebuild.

It's worse than that.  They're not always integers.  It's safest to
treat version numbers as strings as much as possible; when one needs to
break them into integer portions, do this for comparison only, and save
the original.  Finally, a number of packages would require that you
provide a mechanism for determining all version numbers that aren't
strictly numeric.  Openssl, with its \d+.\d+.\d+[a-z] versions is easy.
hddtemp, with its alpha/beta tags, is doable but tedious.

There may be others which are more problematic.  I haven't seen Gentoo
using them, but many kernels are distributed with -[a-z][a-z]\d+
versions, which indicate which alternate maintainer managed the
additional patches beyond the standard kernel version - which is newer,
-mm5 or -bk15?  The world may never know.  (It's only determinate for
specific kernel versions, and frequently it's an apples and lemonade
comparison, as they don't address the same issues.)

Ed

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