Re: [gentoo-dev] Dan: about your version question

[Daniel Robbins]

On Mon, Jul 09, 2001 at 10:23:41AM +0300, Dan Armak wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Thanks for the reply. My most important question is still unanswered however:
> the one about versioning.
> To summarize my previous post: CVS-derived packages can't be compared,
> version-wise, with 'release' versions. A CVS package installed _now_ is
> always the latest version, since it comes straight from CVS. But, a CVS
> package installed any number of days ago may or may not be new enough. So, we
> can't know whether or not dependencies are being satisfied. (Unless we put a
> timestamp on all release versions added to Portage.)

You're right; that's one of the main problems I see in integrating CVS into
Portage.  There's just no way to get a good date for version comparision, at
least if we rely completely on the CVS server.  One option is for the user to
provide a specific "lead version", like 2.1.  Then the snapshot versions can be
labelled 2.1_cvs20010709 and we can do some form of version comparison.  In
thinking about this whole CVS thing, I think it may be best if we simply add
the ability to automate the creation a .tar.bz2 snapshot of the CVS archive,
properly labelled.  Then, it can be uploaded to ibiblio and installed the
normal way.  However, as long as we use some kind of "lead version" technique,
I should be able to add proper version comparisons for cvs stuff, and thus
solve the biggest problem.  2.1_cvs20010709 could be compared against 2.1,
2.1_pre, 2.1_rc3, 2.1.1, etc.  Because it's from CVS, I can have Portage assume
that any 2.1 CVS release is newer than a 2.1 normal release (or even a p
release).

> A better idea I just had: if Portage can be _really_ integrated with cvs
> management, we can fetch the _release_ version from CVS also! So, some
> packages would go into "cvs mode", and would fetch either the specified
> release version, or the latest release version, or the current version -
> depending on the user's global/specific preferences. And then we could query
> the CVS server for dates of release versions!
>
> What do you think?

Well, I'm not sure how to do that.  If you can provide some examples of bash
commands that'll do that, maybe we can integrate it into Portage.  Also, we
need to have a reason to use a release version from CVS if there's a release
.tar.gz file as well.  Is the theory that the CVS release version will have the
latest updates/bug fixes applied?

Best Regards,

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