On 02/04/11 14:56, Scott Ritchie wrote: > This has long been "good practice" for a variety of reasons > > 1) Independent PPA packages of new upstream versions can be > automatically replaced when a proper distro update occurs. > 2) If the PPA package itself gets promoted to the archive, it can be > replaced by just dropping the ~ppa > 3) It makes the version string more meaningful, as it prevents the > possibility of an official and PPA package having the same version > 4) If you are branching foo-0ubuntu1 and need multiple iterations you > now have a proper number to increment without implying you've rebased > off foo-0ubuntu2. > > Making such a change would have other value: > > 1) It makes it much easier to detect nonstandard packages on a system. > This can be done with automated tools too without fear of false > positives (in bug reports, with apport, with update manager, etc) > 2) If all PPA packages were so branded, it would be much easier to > implement a "remove all PPA packages" type of feature. > > > Thoughts?
No, please no, this would be incredibly annoying? I pretty much agree with all the points in your "good practice" list, but the strict string "~ppa(number)" isn't the only way to satisfy them, and there are those of us out there who do understand Debian versioning and can pick reasonable strings ourselves. Whilst I think the widespread promotion of "~ppa1" has overall been a good thing, it has led to one negative effect - people who don't truly understand why it works seem to view "~" as a generic separator character rather than understanding its true meaning. In regards to your "other value" points, it really should not be that hard to implement those features in a more elegant and ultimately more useful way based on APT package lists and Origin metadata, rather than hacking it via substring matching on version strings. That said, I can totally see that it could be a good thing to implement a safety net in Launchpad which denies the ability to upload version strings that "look like" primary archive versions, unless the PPA owner clicks through an "I know what I am doing" questionnaire. Max.
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