Re: [gentoo-dev] Request to add ~> atom prefix operator on Portage.

[Kent Fredric]

On 16 September 2015 at 19:40, konsolebox <konsolebox@×××××.com> wrote:
> And I find it so wrong that it makes me think that it shouldn't have
> been acknowledged by any packaging system.  That versioning madness
> should have been just fixed in the ebuilds level.


Yeah. My experience with versions is its better to have a single
versioning scheme that is regular and well defined, without any
magical "Do everything different if this thing exists here" stuff.
Perl versions suffer seriously from such logic, and gentoo also does,
in different ways.

The reason I believe we permitted versions to have such a variety of
interpretations is to make it easier to track upstream versions 1:1.

But in some places, that just makes our life more miserable for the
attempt, and its more "Sane" to normalise upstream versions into a
scheme that is consistent and makes sense.

After all, that's what our downstream job is: To sanitize upstream for
our users.

And upstream *can* and *will* do utterly rediculous shit with versions
that no single versioning syntax can ever attempt to adjust for. ( For
instance, publishing versions with substrings of MD5s , where the
textual data itself conveys absolutely no relativistic numeric value,
because upstream don't care for progressive scales of versioning, only
a "Have the latest version published or GTFO" mandate, which is
something you can't map sanely )

Hence why perl herd bit that bullet a long time ago and applied a
normalisation scheme, to map the horrible multiple-version-schemes
system into a logical and consistent thing that gentoo handles simply.

It comes with a price of course, that every ebuild has to have a "The
upstream version is really ... " declaration, and people have to
remember to change that when they bump the version, but it leads to
much less dependency version confusions.

-- 
Kent

KENTNL - https://metacpan.org/author/KENTNL