[pacman-dev] [PATCH] makepkg: add option holdver (like --holdver arg)

[Xavier Chantry]

On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 11:55 AM, Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org> wrote:
>
>
> As an aside, looking at holdver makes me realize just how stupid it is.  It
> does not hold the checkout at the version specified, which I bet most people
> thinks it will.  It just stop the pkgver being updated. e.g. I just build
> makepkg-git-19790101-1...
>

I know, it's completely broken. IIRC it only works with svn and cvs.
That's just one of the many problems I have with this whole makepkg vcs stuff...

Maybe that's the whole problem, the system might have been originally
designed with cvs/svn in mind, and all the other version control were
just added on top, not in an ideal way.
The main complaints usually don't concern cvs/svn but all the others.
Or at least the complaints that are not easily fixed.
One of the last bug is actually about svn but seems like an easy fix :
http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/17872

We need to have in mind the big differences between the different
version control system :
1) ability to determine the last version remotely : only svn and bzr ?
(I just remembered that cvs also just uses the current date)
2) ability to checkout the specified date/revision (a linear number
which can be used in pkgver) : yes for cvs/svn, no for git/darcs

I meant for a long time to have a closer and more precise look at the
differences important for makepkg between all vcs. Just did not find
the time/motivation for it.

The second challenge is to have a system that is both flexible and
factorize the most of code between two different PKGBUILD-vcs