[pacman-dev] vercmp discussion (was: String freeze for 3.2 release)

[Dan McGee]

On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 11:35 AM, Xavier <shiningxc at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 5:58 PM, Nagy Gabor <ngaba at bibl.u-szeged.hu> wrote:
>>
>> OK. I believe that RPM guys are cool guys;-) I think they simply don't
>> need this mplayer 1.0rc2 versus 1.0 stuff, because they use different
>> versioning scheme (as I see):
>> http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/mplayer/
>>
>> I agree with you, that hacking vercmp is not a good idea, that's why I
>> say that we should revert the whole stuff. The old code was tested by
>> Archers for long time, and it seems to worked perfectly. (I know
>> that in case of reverting, our work on new vercmp was just a waste of
>> time, sry.) Personally I still don't see what is fixed by the new
>> "imported" code. Or it is notably faster? I can be convinced, but not
>> just saying "trust on RPM guys".
>>
>
> For what it is worth, I totally agree with Nagy. RPM people have to
> deal with different and odd versioning schemes, so unfortunately, we
> can't simply reuse their code as is.
> If our need and usage were closer, it would be a very good idea to
> follow upstream as close as possible, but since it is not the case, I
> am not sure it is a good idea. We indeed had perfectly working code,
> and now we are losing time on a code that didn't really need to be
> changed.
> I think that there are many parts of pacman which require a lot of
> work and attention, but this is not one of them, so I am also in favor
> or just reverting to the good old working code.

I'll admit defeat, I tried. :)

Can someone put together a single revert patch to take care of this? I
know it took us at least two commits to get the vercmp code updated,
so we will probably need to do some manual work to get this reverted.
Obviously the vercmptest script should stay, and perhaps we should add
the proposed tests from Nagy to the mix.

If people do see any improvements that can be "backported" to the
previous code, that would be good to have.

-Dan