On Feb 13, 8:35 am, Alan Williamson <[email protected]> wrote:
> Can i ask why you want an older version?
>
> We'd prefer you use the latest version, as a lot of bug fixes go into
> each one, and we don't wish to encourage old versions being actively
> downloaded and used.
here's an example of our current tomcat-servlet-api
[I] dev-java/tomcat-servlet-api
Available versions:
(2.2) 3
(2.3) 4.1.36
(2.4) 5.5.26 5.5.27
(2.5) 6.0.16 6.0.18
{doc elibc_FreeBSD java5 source}
Installed versions: 4.1.36(2.3)(06:08:09 AM 01/31/2009)(-doc -
elibc_FreeBSD -source)
6.0.18(2.5)(12:39:17 AM 02/13/2009)(-
elibc_FreeBSD -source)
Homepage: http://tomcat.apache.org/
Description: Tomcat's Servlet API 2.5/JSP API 2.1
implementation
as you cans see several versions of the servlet api are available, in
fact 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, and 2.5 are in what are called slots. Meaning they
can be installed in parallel. so you could have 6.0.16 and 5.5.27 on
the same system but not 6.0.16 and 6.0.18 (barring virtual machines,
or chroots, etc).
If I were to add openbd to regen2 I would most likely start with v
1.0.1 but when v1.0.2 came out I would NOT remove the 1.0.1 ebuild
(ebuild is the package format) meaning people would still have to be
able to install it.
the reason for being able to be able to install old version is. We'll
say I have 1.0.1 installed my code works great, 1.0.2 comes out, I
upgrade, something breaks because openbd accidentally (we're all human
here) introduced a regression. I need my code to work, so I go to grab
the older version... it's not there? how do I downgrade? short answer
is I can't.
another reason is that at some point you may decide that the minimum
java required will be java 1.6 or 1.7... etc. People may not wish to
upgrade to the new java, and wish to continue using the old version.
If you don't supply old versions you may be asking them to do
something they can't do (because they require 1.5 for some other peace
of software on the same system)
one of the biggest reasons to keep them around is simply historical.
It provides people a view of where you've been. kernel.org has a 2.2
release from 2004 on their main page.
The last reason is, everyone else in the open source community does,
it's kind of expected.
This doesn't mean you have to support that version (it's quite common
to hear please upgrade to the latest version and reproduce, re-open if
bug is still valid).
you don't have to offer old versions from your main download page. but
you should offer a link to your archives.
hopefully, you'll agree that this is the correct way to do things.
unfortunately without being able to maintain older versions (not
necessarily for an infinite amount of time, by the time you reach
version 4, removing version 1 from the archives is probably
acceptable) I would be unable to add this package to our repositories.
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