[pacman-dev] [PATCH] Autoversion deps upon package creation in makepkg

[Dan McGee]

On Dec 21, 2007 5:25 PM, Nagy Gabor <ngaba at bibl.u-szeged.hu> wrote:
> > On Sun, Dec 02, 2007 at 11:53:00AM +0800, Darwin Bautista wrote:
> > > Hi all,
> > >
> > > Attached is a patch to add "autoversion of dependencies" in
> > > makepkg. I think the usage of the term "autoversion" is a little
> > > vague but I can't of any other term. Anyway, autoversioning will
> > > save package maintainers a lot of time in adding and bumping the
> > > minimum required versions of a certain package's dependencies
> > > directly in the PKGBUILD. Of course, this autoversioning can be
> > > overridden by directly specifying the minimum/maximum (if
> > > ever)/exact version of a dep. Autoversioning can be disabled by
> > > using these opts: '-v' or '--nodepsver'.
> > >
> > > I've seen quite a lot of packages (extra, community) which have
> > > "out-dated" or wrong minimum versions of the deps. For instance,
> > > I've seen a package (which I can't remember) of a KDE app built
> > > against KDE 3.5.8 yet the specified minimum version is 3.5.7 (or
> > > older?). This can help prevent bugs resulting from this seemingly
> > > subtle issue.
> > >
> >
> > Hm I hoped someone would reply to this. I thought it might be
> > interesting, but I don't really know.
> > Could you please file this as a feature request on flyspray? A mail
> > on the ML is likely to be forgotten rapidly, while a feature request
> > would stay there.
> >
> Well, I will be unpopular again:
>
> 1. First of all, I think that our maintainers should set dependencies
> by hand, because this autoversion stuff just guarantees that the
> generated dependency is a satisfier, but it may be too strict (for
> example currently it generates 'a52dec>=0.7.4-3' from a52dec and maybe
> simple 'a52dec' or 'a52dec>=0.7' would be enough)

I think it would be a more feasible idea if versioned dependencies
were NOT the default. What would others think of something like this?

> 2. Provision dependencies?

Great point, Nagy. pacman -Q would fail on those (sh, cron, etc).

-Dan