[aur-general] When should pkgrel be updated?

[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.