[arch-general] arch-release

[Lukáš Jirkovský]

2009/8/26 Aaron Griffin <aaronmgriffin at gmail.com>:
> 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
>

What about putting date when pacman -Syu was run for a last time in
that file? It would still suffer from lag when using mirrors but I
guess it should be accurate enough.

Lukas