On 2008 Sep 10, at 18:43, Duncan Coutts wrote:
On Wed, 2008-09-10 at 18:35 -0400, Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH wrote:
On 2008 Sep 10, at 17:51, Duncan Coutts wrote:
dependent packages don't get confused when it's re-released. If
we're
considering modifying hackage's versioning, we should probably
decide
if we want/need this now instead of having to add it in later when
something major goes *boom*.
We've thought about this and we think we do not need epoch numbers
since
we're in the lucky position of doing the upstream versioning.
Are we? I think the package author has final say if a package needs
to be backed off, and any packages released between the rollback and
the next release with dependencies on the backed-off package will be
problematic, no matter how draconian hackage's version checking is.
(This is a different situation from datecode versions as in the trac
ticket.)
I'm not quite sure I follow. Certainly it's the author/maintainer who
decides the version number. It's up to them to pick it, but they know
the ordering of version numbers.
As I understand it, epochs were mainly introduced to cope with
un-cooperative upstream maintainers whereas here maintainers already
have to specify a version number in the Cabal/Hackage scheme and
there's
That is one use. The far more common use, at least in FreeBSD ports,
is when a version of a port has to be backed off; if any subsequently
released packages depend on the backed-off version, things get nasty
when the port is re-updated later. This may not involve the port
author; it could be an unexpected interaction with an updated
dependency under certain circumstances.
"Backed off", in the FreebSD context, means an older version of the
port is restored from CVS; in the context of Hackage it means removing
the broken version and making the previous version the current version.
Basically, you *do* have control over this... but it's possible for
the effects to propagate rather widely before such an interaction is
discovered, resulting in needing to revise either many packages to
reflect the corrected dependency... or updating one epoch.
--
brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university KF8NH
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