Ardo van Rangelrooij <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Yes, as far as I'm concerned we're to use the recommended versioning > scheme with all the advantages of multiple version installed at the > same time you mentioned. Also we're supporting your hybrid setup for > packages where it makes more (practical) sense to do so. Versioning > is fine, but if it becomes a hassle then by all means don't use it. > This I leave to the judgement of the package maintainers. If in the > future it makes us incompatible wit other distro's (and the LSB) > then we can always drop it and allow only versioned directories. > We're only at the beginning of the new setup and I don't mind playing > around with both schemes to see how things work out.
As I said before, I don't mind versioned directories, but I object to versioning the packages -- at least, one package for every minor version seems idiotic. I can understand, say, a version of docbook DTDs for major versions, such a 3.x, 4.x, etc. I cannot see why it makes sense for docbook-xsl-stylesheets. So what, there are different bugs in different versions. This stuff isn't very stable yet! Is that any good reason to promote the endless bloat of one package for every minor version of a package? Users can put packages on hold if they want to stick with a particular version. It seems like that notion is contrary to the Debian way. I defy you to point to *one* other package in debian which has a new version for every minor update of the software. There isn't any. I beg you to keep in mind how difficult it is to actually remove packges from Debian. Suppose you decide that 1.40 is a really good stable version, and that use of the older 1.29 version is no longer needed. So you want the archive maintainer to delete the old versions. Fine -- but there are 11 of them by now. And it takes around a year for the archive maintainers to get to that. By then, there are 40 versions or more. I ask again: do we really want docbook-xls-stylesheets-1.29, docbook-xls-stylesheets-1.30, docbook-xls-stylesheets-1.31, docbook-xls-stylesheets-1.32, docbook-xls-stylesheets-1.33 in Debian? I really feel strongly about the stupidity of this. If you guys *still* think we need to do this (versioned packages for every minor update), we need to get archive maitnainer approval since they may reject the scheme. > About the upgrades, that' a good question. To be honest I've no idea > whether that's useful. I can imagine that users don't care about what > version they're running as long as it works, but I've no idea that's > what docbook users do as normal practice. This is probably also one > of those things we're to see how it works out. This is precisely why we shoudln't have another packge name for every minor version. To restate -- I am *not* against versioning for major verisons, such as the docbook DTD 3.1, 4.0, 4.1, or something. This makes good compatability sense. But to do that for the stylesheets, when poeple aren't addressing stylesheet FPIs directly with versions, makes little to no sense. Perl 5.006, perl 5.005, is another example. But we don't have versioned perl directories for every minor release (5.005_03, etc). That doesn't mean we couldn't have the versioned /usr/share/sgml/... directory however, and a symlink to that. It jsut means there would only be 1 installed at any given time. People may object: Well, verison 1.29 works for document X, and 1.30 works for document Y, so I need both. I would counter that this means the upstream version is unstable and buggy and people should work with the upstream maintaint to get the software to be more robust. Consider another problem. Suppoes you find a bug in your maintainer scripts which has been around for a while. Suddenly you'll have to fix and re-upload X differernt copies of docbook-xsl-stylesheets! -- .....Adam Di [EMAIL PROTECTED]<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>
