Am Fri, 1 Apr 2011 08:12:42 +0800
schrieb Oon-Ee Ng
I've seen (in the past) various packages on the AUR which jumped by 3 or 4 pkgrels in a very short period of time. Sometimes it happens like this:-
1. Maintainer changes something and breaks the package with pkgrel=2 2. Bug reported on comments. Maintainer reverts change and makes pkgrel=3
It can also happen like this:-
1. Maintainer makes changes to pkgdesc or cleans up some of the commands, depends, etc. sets pkgrel=2
For both of the cases above, is pkgrel updating really necessary? For the second one, I think not, as changing documentation doesn't (shouldn't) require recompilation of the package by its users. Similarly if depends changes, users who already have the package installed would already have the dep, so no reason for such users to upgrade?
For the first case its a bit more tricky. My reasoning is that if the PKGBUILD breaks and can't be built at all, the maintainer could simply release with the same pkgrel. Noone would have been able to build pkgrel=2 in that example anyway, so why jump to pkgrel=3?
The reason I bring this up is because there's no easy way (yet) to diff what's changed between versions of the package, and hence when I notice a pkgrel change I can't really check to see what has been changed and whether its worth recompiling the package (for larger packages like firefox4 this can be significant).
Comments appreciated.
In both cases pkgrel needs to be incremented. In the first case a package was changed which probably had an influence of the resulting package. So people need to update this package to get these changes. If there's a bug in the package this bug should, of course, be fixed. To let the user know about this fix and let the users install the fixed package it's, of course, also necessary to increment pkgrel. In the second case there have been made changes to commands and depends. Both can also have influence of the resulting package. If a dependency is added it's, of course, necessary that people install these dependencies, too. If a dependency is removed people should also be notified about this. This could e.g. happen if a dependency was renamed in or removed from the repos, two libraries have been merged, etc. A changed command usually has also an influence on the resulting package. Pkgrel shouldn't be incremented only if an unimportant part was changed like changing pkgdesc, removing or adding a comment, etc. If something is changed which results or can result in a modified package the pkgrel should be incremented. Heiko