Re: Pending packages status

[Igor Pechtchanski <pechtcha at cs dot nyu dot edu>]

On Fri, 7 Mar 2003, Pavel Tsekov wrote:

> On Fri, 7 Mar 2003, Charles Wilson wrote:
>
> > Yep, IIRC it *was* Pavel's personal preference.  It cetainly isn't mine.
> >   I agree with Max: packages should be uniquely identified, to avoid
> > confusion *during the prerelease phase*.  Imagine:
> >
> > "Bob, there's a proplem with your foo-1.3.2-1 package"
> > "That's fixed in the third release of foo-1.3.2-1"
> > "Wait, Bob, I thought I was using the third release.  Are you sure?"
> > "Nope, you're right -- it's the *fourth* release that fixes the problem.
> >   Here's the package md5sum..."
> > "Um, bob, I just downloaded foo-1.3.2-1 and it has md5sum xxxx.  Is that
> > newer, or older than the mythical fourth release?"
> > "Yeah, sorry about that.  I gave you the md5sum of the fourth
> > pre-release.  I expected that you would simply compare it to the md5sum
> > of the package you've been complaining about (#3 ?).  However, you can't
> > download the #3 nor #4 prereleases anymore. We're up to the sixth
> > pre-release, and THAT is what you just downloaded..."
>
> You're assuming that the guy has enough web space to hold all
> intermidiate releases. I've never seen this here. New packages are
> uploaded and the old ones removed.

One issue here is caching servers.  I've been bitten many times by them,
changing a file on the server, but then getting an old copy for about 3
hours until the cache is updated (buggy cache, of course, but oh, so
possible).  Changing the name circumvents this.

> [snip]
> My point back then, when I replied to Daniel, was that I'm not doing this
> because "I like it this way". If you think about it, there is no gain for
> me to prefer one way over the other. This was my understanding of how the
> release process should work and it was based on the documentation on how to
> make packages.
>
> I'm not some freak who cant accept other peoples opinions. I'm open and
> since I see that my way is unacceptable for many of the people here, I
> agree that if a maintainer wants to bump the number then it is up to him
> not me.

Noone implied you were.  If the documentation suggests that this is the
only way, then the documentation should be changed...

> My work here is simple - keep a list of packages so people won't forget
> about them.
> [snip]
> The important thing is to keep the packages coming.

Amen. :-)
	Igor
-- 
				http://cs.nyu.edu/~pechtcha/
      |\      _,,,---,,_		pechtcha at cs dot nyu dot edu
ZZZzz /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_		igor at watson dot ibm dot com
     |,4-  ) )-,_. ,\ (  `'-'		Igor Pechtchanski
    '---''(_/--'  `-'\_) fL	a.k.a JaguaR-R-R-r-r-r-.-.-.  Meow!

Oh, boy, virtual memory! Now I'm gonna make myself a really *big* RAMdisk!
  -- /usr/games/fortune