Gentoo: dev-lang/erlang

[Bruce Fitzsimons]

Hi George (cc to the helpful people on erlang-questions -- George maintains,
amongst other things, the ebuild package for erlang in the Gentoo linux
distribution),

I agree it is complicated, I wasn't aware of those restrictions on ebuilds.
I would suggest simplifying the version number by treating the letters as
numbers, where A = 0, so R9B-1 becomes 9.1.1, R8A-0 becomes 8.0.0. A note in
the description that says the untranslated Erlang version number might be
handy too.

What do you think?

Thanks for taking the time to write such a detailed response.

/Bruce

----- Original Message -----
From: "George Shapovalov" <george@REDACTED>
To: "Bruce Fitzsimons" <bruce.fitzsimons@REDACTED>
Sent: Friday, May 23, 2003 4:34 PM
Subject: Re: Gentoo: dev-lang/erlang


> Hi Bruce.
>
> Thank you for your interest in Gentoo and erlang in particular.
> Regarding the versioning of the package: I should say that I am not happy
with
> such versioning either, however I could not find any better approach at
the
> moment.
> The naming scheme for ebuilds is described here:
> http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-howto.xml#doc_chap2
>
> The relevant part ("Naming ebuild Files ") says that the PV (version) part
of
> ebuild name should contain set of dot-separated numbers with optional
> (single) letter right after the last number. For example 1.2.3a. There can
be
> no numbers following the letter. It is possible to append a suffix, one of
> _alpha, _beta, _pre or _rc, however any suffix denotes (diferent stage of)
> pre-release version. Thus after having erlang R9b with ebuild named -9b
with
> the r9b-1 version I did not have much room in selecting the valid PV
> construct, so that new version would indeed denote another version and
would
> be recognized by portage as newer. I settled for 9c as an easy fix in the
> hope that, as it was with 8b, new version will have increased numeric
number.
>
> The alternative might be to use the revisions by appending -rX to the
ebuild
> name. However this is really undesirable because:
> 1. -rX are supposed to mark updates to the ebuilds corresponding to the
same
> version of package.
> 2. this will very easily go out of sync should I need to do any updates to
> ebuild taht would require a revision bump.
> Thus this does not resolve the situation in any way either.
>
> If you can come up with some naming scheme that would resolve this
situation I
> would greatly appreciate your help. It would be best to avoid the
out-of-sync
> versioning issue and keep the posibility of "automated" updates by just
> renaming the ebuild, however this part is from the "desirable" category
and
> is optional :).
>
> George
>
>
> On Thursday 22 May 2003 20:27, you wrote:
> > Hi George,
> >
> > Thanks for maintaining the gentoo erlang entry. Can I make a suggestion
> > that the erlang version numbers should more closely reflect the current
> > erlang?
> >
> > The Erlang version numbers are little odd, but you've just defined
> > version "9c", which maps to R9B-1. There will be a real R9C (R9C-0) out
> > soon with a bunch of new stuff.
> >
> > Its not a big thing, but I did have to manually inspect the package file
> > to see which version it was really installing.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Bruce
>
>
>