[arch-general] arch-release

[Aaron Griffin]

On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 4:06 AM, Magnus Therning<magnus at therning.org> wrote:
> 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 ;-)

Let's just put "1.0" in the file :)

/me remembers the "Arch isn't stable, it's not even 1.0 yet!"
arguments from the past