[arch-general] changelogs (was Re: postgresql 9.3 -> 9.4)

[Georg Altmann]

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On 29.01.2015 17:44, Lukas Fleischer wrote:
> On Thu, 29 Jan 2015 at 17:06:43, Georg Altmann wrote:
>> [...] On 29.01.2015 14:22, Bardur Arantsson wrote:
>>> If the problem here is that it would be a chore to do this for
>>>  maintainers for every X.Y -> X.(Y+1) upgrade, then maybe Arch
>>>  package descriptions could grow a field or flag to handle such
>>>  things semi-automatically? Maybe something as simple as "if
>>> the version number is about to change in *this way*, then warn
>>> loudly using *this message*".
>> 
>> Wouldn't that be a sensible way? The increased overhead for the 
>> maintainer would be to tick a flag in addition to the version
>> bump. In the case of postgresql this would be a as simple as
>> 
>> if (oldMajor < newMajor || ((oldMajor == newMajor) && (oldMinor <
>> newMinor)) { printUpgradeWarning(); }
>> 
>> Of course the condition would have to be serialized in the
>> package meta-data some way. I have only very limited knowledge on
>> the pacman internals. Maybe someone can come up with an estimate
>> how big the effort would be to implement this. [...]
> 
> It isn't that easy. You cannot simply tick a flag, you need to
> maintain a variable that keeps track of the last version that
> caused a warning. Otherwise, there's no way to warn a user who
> upgrades straight from 1.0.0 to 2.1.0 when there were intermediate
> releases 1.1.0 and 2.0.0 and some change between 1.1.0 and 2.0.0
> that is worth a warning. And as a matter of fact, that is what we
> already do in a lot of packages. You can have a look at the install
> scriptlets of btrfs-progs, cups, dhcp, dmraid, dovecot, ebtables,
> intel-ucode, linux, lirc, lvm2, mariadb, nginx, openvpn, systemd,
> varnish, just to get an idea of what it looks like. As I mentioned
> before, adding a similar check to PostgreSQL might be a good idea
> but I, as a non-PostgreSQL user, cannot judge whether that works
> and is worthwhile.

For postgresql it is exactly that easy. A comparison of the version
numbers is enough: If they differ at least a minor version, churn out
the warning. Implementing it this way, the overhead for the maintainer
would be zero.
But thanks for clarifying. I will look into the scriptlets for the
packages you mentioned. And I will try to make a bug report based on
that for postgresql.


Regards,
Georg
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