Re: [gentoo-dev] JFYIOR: A Simple Package Versioning Spec

[Taahir Ahmed]

Instead of adding more and more layers to the Gentoo versioning spec to
work around insane upstreams, why not put the relative ordering of
versions into the ebuilds?

Then, a version identifier would just be a unique string.

An ebuild would declare which version strings it succeeds.

Then even in the case of an upstream that did something stupid, like
only releasing versions identified by the git commit ID, the package
manager can both:

  * Use the upstream versioning scheme.

  * Know which version is "best", by finding a topological ordering on
    the succession graph.

---- mypackage-insaneversionspec1.ebuild -------------------------------
...
# This was the first release of the package, so it succeeds nothing.
VERSION_SUCCEEDS=""
...
---- EOF ---------------------------------------------------------------

---- mypackage-insaneversionspec2.ebuild -------------------------------
...
# This was the second release of the package, so it succeeds the first
# version.
VERSION_SUCCEEDS="insaneversionspec2"
...
---- EOF ---------------------------------------------------------------

Obviously, the downside of this scheme is that you have to load and
parse every ebuild for a given atom, rather than being able to find the
best one just by walking the filenames.

Taahir Ahmed