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

[Darwin Bautista]

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 had the thought of including the pkgrel because of qt4's (in
[community]) move from /opt/qt4 (4.3.2-1) to /usr (4.3.2-2). But now,
come to think of it, it might have been a bad idea after all because
those kind of changes doesn't really happen in every package release.
Anyway, the pkgrel can be dropped so that it isn't too strict and
autoversioning can be off by default.

Also, the packager can override the autoversion behavior by explicitly
specifying the required versions. I just thought that it would be
simpler (KIS) and better if the "real" versions of dependencies are
included in a package. For instance, a52dec>=0.7.4 instead of just
a52dec>=0.7 (what if there's a soname change? Just a whatif/caveat
even though .4 is just a minor/maintenance release).

-- 
Darwin M. Bautista
BS Electronics and Communications Engineering
University of the Philippines Diliman
http://www.darwin.uk.to

University of the Philippines Linux Users' Group
http://www.uplug.org