[Haskell-cafe] Hackage policy question

[John Meacham]

On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 06:48:47PM +0000, Duncan Coutts wrote:
> > yeah, but then we have the odd case of things like frisby 0.9.0 and
> > 0.9.0.1 both floating about, where the second is actually just the
> > cabalized version of the first, and not an actual version. it gets even
> > more complicated if I actually want to create a _real_ frisby 0.9.0.1
> > for a bug fix in the code. A dedicated 'release' number would be ideal
> > and would make things more in line with the other packaging formats.
> 
> What would it mean? Is frisby-0.9.0-r1 different from frisby-0.9.0? Can
> I install both at once? Is it just a tag on one digit of the version
> number or does it change the semantics? Can another package depend on
> frisby >= 0.9.0-r3 ?

No, the idea of a release number is that it does not take place in
dependency tracking. frisby-0.9.0 is the base package, independent of
hackage,rpm, or any distro that defines the API and is what you depend
on in code. the release specifies the current 'roll' or 'build', a
specific set of options and commands to get it to build in a certain
environment. frisby-0.9.0-r4 always superceeds and should replace
frisby-0.9.0-r3, but as far as anything is concerned frisby-0.9.0 is all
that is installed. Another motivating situation is that I generally
don't maintain the cabalized (or debed for that matter) builds of my
tools but they are done by third parties, so when they need to upload a
fixed version to hackage, it would give them a place to bump up the
release number without having to coordinate anything upstream. It says
"this is a new hackaged version of the same project".

        John

-- 
John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈