[aur-general] Revise VCS packages versioning

[Doug Newgard]

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> Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2013 15:35:24 -0500
> From: 1007380 at gmail.com
> To: aur-general at archlinux.org
> Subject: Re: [aur-general] Revise VCS packages versioning
>
> On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 09:17:41PM +0100, Uwe Koloska wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> Am 31.10.2013 16:09, schrieb Jerome Leclanche:
>>> The main issue with -git versioning is the inconsistency.
>>
>> I don't think so. I think the main issue with git versioning (regarding
>> package versions) is its non monotonic trait.
>
> Thing is, there are really only two types of -git versioning:
>
> * Those with tags
> * Those without

I disagree. Many of those without tags do have a version number that you can pull from somewhere, configure.ac, setup.py, etc.

There is also a very common case where using the git tag will give you the wrong version number. I'll use Enlightenment as an example as I maintain the Git PKGBUILD. When version 0.17.0 was released, a tag is was created then it was branched. All of the other release tags are in this branch, 0.17.{1,2,3,4}. If you use git describe on the master branch, it will return 0.17.0 making it appear to be older than the releases from the stable branch. Really, the correct version is 0.17.99, which is what is used in the help menus, pkg-config, etc. A bit of grep is all it takes to have a correct pkgver in this case.