[aur-general] Revise VCS packages versioning

[Anatol Pomozov]

Hi

On Wed, Oct 30, 2013 at 10:47 PM, William Giokas <1007380 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 30, 2013 at 09:49:11PM -0700, Anatol Pomozov wrote:
>> Hi
>>
>> On Wed, Oct 30, 2013 at 8:51 PM, Jerome Leclanche <adys.wh at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > As someone who maintains a lot of git packages, I wish, I really wish
>> > there was a *standardized* way of writing a pkgver that would output
>> > the appropriate format whether there are tags pushed upstream or not.
>>
>> That is what I intended to propose next.
>>
>> As the regexp become more complicated it is better if makepkg will
>> take care of generating the package version. I think makepkg should
>> have a shell function, something like 'generate_pkgver_vcs()' that
>> user can use in pkgver().
>>
>> e.g.
>>
>> pkgver() {
>>   cd repo
>>   generate_pkgver_vcs()
>> }
>>
>> This function will
>> 1) Find what VCS is used
>> 2) Generate appropriate VCS version
>>
>
> I would urge you to look at one of the newer features of pacman,
> makepkg-template. You can do such things as this very easily. I already
> maintain a small and probably awful repository[1]/package[2] with a few
> VCS pkgver functions that you can use. Mostly they have been taken from
> the wiki, though I do have a nice, long sed expression that does the
> 'r' prefixing (I wrote that talk article).
>
> [1]: http://git.kaictl.net/wgiokas/makepkg-templates.git/
> [2]: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/makepkg-templates-ks-git/
>
> --SNIP--
>> >> Another issue is a repo that has no tags. Here is a recommendation
>> >> from the wiki page:
>> >>
>> >> printf "%s.%s" "$(git rev-list --count HEAD)" "$(git rev-parse --short HEAD)"
>> >>
>> >> that will use number of commits (a large number e.g. 3000). The
>> >> problem arises when the project creates first tag e.g. 0.1. I suggest
>> >> to fix this problem by using "0" as a tag version (and add prefix 'r'
>> >> like in the previous item). This makes sure that non-tagged version is
>> >> always less that a tagged version.
>> >>
>> >> So pkgver() will look like:
>> >>
>> >> printf "0.r%s.%s" "$(git rev-list --count HEAD)" "$(git rev-parse --short HEAD)"
>> >>
>> >> Let me know if you have any objections. If not then I'll update the wiki page.
>
> This is not needed at all. If the project starts using tags, use an
> epoch= to set all versions from then on to be greater than the original
> versions with rev-list.

Personally I do not like using epoch for such cases as it uglifies the
version number.

I see 2 options for non-tagged versions:

1) With "0." prefix. e.g. "0.r453". So beginning of the project
history acts as a "release number zero" that is lower than any tagged
version.

2) Without the prefix. e.g. "r453", it also works fine and makes the
version a little bit shorter.

$ vercmp 0.1 r543
1


I prefer option #1 as it makes version more consistent between tagged
and non-tagged versions, but I can live with #2 as well.




BTW Most of the -git packages add 'short SHA1 of the HEAD'  as suffix
e.g. '2.2.r9.g6c8d8ae-1'. In fact this SHA1 (g6c8d8ae in this example)
is not used in the version comparison and not needed. I suggest to
drop the SHA1 from recommended -git version and leave only the 'rXXX'
part, e.g.

0.r32.gfoobar => 0.r31
2.2.r4.g23423234 => 2.2.r4

This makes versions shorter and nicer, and makes it more consistent
with other VCS.