Gentoo: dev-lang/erlang

[George Shapovalov]

Hi Bruce.

Replying to the list, since this will probably concern many people. Pelease 
note, I am not on the list atm (though if more issues come up I believe I 
will have to sign up to this one :as well )), so if you want me to get your 
reply lease put me in CC.

On Monday 26 May 2003 21:48, Bruce Fitzsimons wrote:
> 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.
Yup, incidentally I thought about this and was thinking about switching to 
similar scheme when R10 comes out :). I would probably have done so from the 
beginning had I not observed R8B and then R9B and assumed that this is a 
complete version name, e.g no stuff is going to be added after the last 
letter. And yea, the original submission by Charlie Mac had -8b in the name  
:).

The real question however is what to do with the present stuff - the R9 
versions. Its inconvenient version numbers vs having to move stuff that is 
already in and is depended upon by some other packages. Basically it comes 
down to the following questions:

1. How many more versions are planned in the R9 branch before R10 gets issued?
If R9c will be followed by R10 it might be better to just keep this mismatch 
(9C will be 9d.ebuild) and switch to numeric versioning starting with R10 
(note, the ordering of versions will be preserved in portage, so that newver 
versions will be picked up properly - thus the necessity of this mangling).

2. On a related note: how many gentoo usres are on this list? If there are 
any, would you prefer to have more correspondance in version numbers for 9B 
series (namely by mapping A=0, B=1, etc.) but you would have to remerge 
erlang in order to bring your system to a consistend state? (I think 
remerging packages dependent upon it can be avoided, unless this is done 
simultaneously with erlang update. Still unnecessary recompilation but seems 
to be the easiest way through this). Or would you rather live with this 
mismatch until R10 comes around? (you can always look up the "real" version 
in ebuild of course)
Note, this change will be observable as "downgrade" as 9.x.xb is considered 
newver than 9.x.x with x's being any numbers.

George