[aur-general] Revise VCS packages versioning

[Anatol Pomozov]

Hi

> The sha1 is useful to people who need to quickly tell developers which
> version they are running when they're from git. Removing it is a bad
> idea.

You can get the commit from the version number even without the SHA1,
something like:

git log --oneline $VERSION..$BRANCH | tail -n $REVISION | head -n 1

Where $BRANCH is the one used in PKGBUILD (usually it is HEAD).


Anyway VCS-package users suppose to follow HEAD version closely. In
those rare cases when a user sees problem in no-release non-HEAD
version and tries to contact upstream developers I bet the first
question from the developers will be "Could you please update to HEAD
and see if the problem still exists?".

> The main issue with -git versioning is the inconsistency. The proto
> file for it is terribly out of date, not everyone respects whatever
> flavour of the recommended way is current, and not every git
> repository has tags (creating a need for two different functions, the
> need of which cannot be told until build time). A further issue arises
> from that, which is that repositories without tags may get tags later
> on and the package maintainer may not know about that (leaving the old
> versioning in), or using the new versioning may break versioning for
> other packages.
>
> I'm not suggesting we drop the pkgver function (nobody is). I'm saying
> we need a standardized pkgver script that outputs consistent,
> compatible results between tagged and non-tagged git repos, and
> recommend that as the proto. To that end, I liked the proposal of
> 0.7.r19.ge4e6e20 vs 0.r19.ge4e6e20.
>
> J. Leclanche