[arch-general] arch-release

[Magnus Therning]

On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 9:45 AM, Jan de Groot<jan at jgc.homeip.net> wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-08-26 at 10:40 +0200, Gerhard Brauer wrote:
>> Am Mittwoch, den 26.08.2009, 09:56 +0200 schrieb Jan de Groot:
>>
>> > As Arch is a rolling release system, we decided to remove the file. But
>> > as tools use this file to identify Arch systems, we decided to keep the
>> > file, but make it empty.
>> >
>> > 2009.08 won't be 2009.08 as soon as you run pacman -Syu ;)
>>
>> To far this we could maybe add a function to pacman, so that after every
>> -Syu the unixtime gets written to this file.
>> This would give us:
>> * IMHO the highest version/release number a software/distribution ever
>>   have.
>> * The individual content of this file then represent the nature of a
>>   rolling release.
>>
>> Ok, just kidding ;-)
>
> And within 28 years it will overflow so we have a negative version
> number :P

Of course the correct way of solving that would be to define an epoch
for Arch, e.g. starting when Arch was first announced.  Then we'd have
to define a tick to be the time between package uploads to the master
repo.  (Correct counting of ticks can of course only happen from now
on, but we still have to estimate the number of ticks since epoch to
now, if for nothing else then for our sanity.)  Then we modify the
mirroring so that it is guaranteed to always hand out packages from
the same tick (the current tick is established at start of download).
Then Pacman must be modified to pick out the repos mentioned in
/etc/pacman.conf mirroring the latest tick and only use those for the
operation, it must of course also make sure that the mirror's tick is
later than the system's.

That sounds like a plan... oh, no, I forgot, this is Arch and not Debian ;-)

/M

-- 
Magnus Therning                        (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4)
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