Re: [dev] surf release?

From: 7heo <7heo_AT_mail.com>
Date: Mon, 01 Jun 2015 17:34:28 +0200

I personally understand your problem (I shortly contributed to alpine and had to report problems upstream, and I was more than glad when they accepted to merge my patches upstream, so I hear you), but I still think that arbitrary versions are the wrong approach. Arbitrary versions exist only so marketing departments all over the world can charge customers for a "new" product. Developers work with version-control systems, which aren't using anything close to arbitrary, semantically.

So yeah, it would solve your problem in the short term, but it would also encourage bad practices, which is a real problem on the long run.

Let's drop versions. Especially in the case of suckless, where software configuration is achieved via compilation, and thus where packages are counter productive.

So TL;DR: it's not hard, it's just wrong.

On June 1, 2015 5:07:15 PM CEST, Joerg Jung <mail_AT_umaxx.net> wrote:
>Hi,
>
>you are both wrong.
>
>On Mon, Jun 01, 2015 at 04:39:39PM +0200, 7heo wrote:
>> My point exactly. Plus, it does not even solve an actual problem.
>
>It does, it makes life for downstream package maintainers (like me)
>easier, as no cherry-picking of patches or own releases are required.
>
>> On June 1, 2015 4:33:55 PM CEST, "Martti Kühne" <mysatyre_AT_gmail.com>
>wrote:
>> >No it wouldn't help downstream package maintainers.
>
>It helps, see above.
>
>> >You're right in that package maintainers can't tell where the fixes
>> >and new features are coming in, they'll not introduce their own
>> >releases.
>
>Right, you disproved your own sentence above.
>
>> >However upstream is not everyone's taste either,
>
>The default setting match the taste of *enough* people, so that it is
>worthwhile to roll a package based on releases. This is proven by
>the available packages in the various distributions.
>
>> > in that configuration
>> > changes require recompiling of the respective binary.
>
>There are package managers which allow very easy re-compiling of
>packages with own patch-sets, especially due to projects like suckless.
>Several people, still prefer re-compiling of packages based on the
>given
>releases. Because from sysadmin point of view, packages are always
>wanted and preferred over random source builds.
>
>> >Releases hence make sense for software that fits everyone's needs
>with
>> >their configuration files, which is untrue either for most suckless
>> >projects.
>
>Releases make sense for several reasons, even for suckless projects and
>and adding a tag is not hard, right?
>
>Regards,
>Joerg
Received on Mon Jun 01 2015 - 17:34:28 CEST