[aur-general] When should pkgrel be updated?

[Heiko Baums]

Am Fri, 1 Apr 2011 08:12:42 +0800
schrieb Oon-Ee Ng <ngoonee.talk at gmail.com>:

> 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.

In both cases pkgrel needs to be incremented.

In the first case a package was changed which probably had an influence
of the resulting package. So people need to update this package to get
these changes. If there's a bug in the package this bug should, of
course, be fixed. To let the user know about this fix and let the users
install the fixed package it's, of course, also necessary to increment
pkgrel.

In the second case there have been made changes to commands and
depends. Both can also have influence of the resulting package. If a
dependency is added it's, of course, necessary that people install
these dependencies, too. If a dependency is removed people should also
be notified about this. This could e.g. happen if a dependency was
renamed in or removed from the repos, two libraries have been merged,
etc. A changed command usually has also an influence on the resulting
package.

Pkgrel shouldn't be incremented only if an unimportant part was changed
like changing pkgdesc, removing or adding a comment, etc.

If something is changed which results or can result in a modified
package the pkgrel should be incremented.

Heiko