[aur-general] Bump pkgrel just to force recompilation

[Eli Schwartz]

On 08/10/2017 06:33 AM, Justus-dev at Piater.name wrote:
> Hi -
> 
> I keep running into problems caused by stale installations from the AUR,
> such as upgraded, ABI-incompatible dependencies or Python packages still
> installed under /usr/lib/python3.5/ where they are no longer found since
> the move to python3.6.
> 
> My understanding is that in such situations, the affected packages
> should bump pkgrel to force rebuild and reinstall, even if the source
> and the rest of the PKGBUILD remain unchanged.
> 
> Is this understanding correct?  If so, can this be clarified in places
> such as [1][2] where people cannot miss it?
> 
> Confronted with this issue, some maintainers advise their users to just
> rebuild by hand, but that defeats part of the purpose of package
> management systems.  I don't want to have to debug weird run-time errors
> one by one, trace the problem to this trivial issue, and then solve each
> of them by manual rebuild.

The problem is that there really isn't an official rule. Some people
feel that "users should know and check for themselves", some people feel
that maintainers should be responsible for making sure people know to
upgrade.

My personal feeling on the matter is that both of these arguments are
completely missing the point.
pkgrel is supposed to monotonically increase on each rebuild of the
package. If the maintainer doesn't do that on the AUR, then users would
have to do that themselves, by editing the PKGBUILD. As a result, there
is a lousy choice between not knowing when the maintainer pushes a
different pkgrel update because e.g. changed dependencies/build()
function, and having no sane upgrade path but being forced to reinstall
the same $pkgver-$pkgrel (and among other things, this will break the
model used by aurutils).

To my great displeasure, I have no actual way of enforcing reason on the
entire world. :D

-- 
Eli Schwartz

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