[aur-general] Changes in Arch packaging standards

[Jelle van der Waa]

On 12/06/13 at 10:22am, Jerome Leclanche wrote:
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> On Fri, Dec 6, 2013 at 9:59 AM, Sven-Hendrik Haase <sh at lutzhaase.com> wrote:
> > On 06.12.2013 10:45, Sergej Pupykin wrote:
> >> At Fri, 06 Dec 2013 09:42:11 +0001,
> >> Maxime Gauduin <alucryd at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>> I would change that rule a bit, because wxgtk is a special case. The
> >>> 2.9 branch is a devel branch, keeping wxgtk for the stable branch and
> >>> adding a suffix for the devel branch makes sense. Speaking of wxgtk,
> >>> now that 3.0.0 is out, we will most likely need to get rid of wxgtk29
> >>> and create a legacy wxgtk28 package.
> >>>
> >>> Anyway, imho the rule should be: use plain name for the latest stable
> >>> release, and add the appropriate suffix (usually 1 or 2 digits) for any
> >>> other release.
> >> I prefer leave all things as is without any new rules. There are
> >> packages that have multiple stable branches.
> >
> > I went ahead and proposed a new rule because I also think this should be
> > in the guidelines:
> > https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Talk:Arch_Packaging_Standards#Package_naming
> >
> > Comments?
> > <https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Talk:Arch_Packaging_Standards#Package_naming>
> >
> 
> Sensitive topic: Why doesn't arch support multiple versions for the
> same packages?
> Whenever it's brought up, there's always the answer that Arch is a
> rolling release (and we're all happy with that). But pretty obviously
> there are cases where multiple versions are useful and needed. It
> strikes me that all of this would be a non-issue if maintainers were
> able to make a certain set of versions available for packages, and
> users were able to install multiple versions of the same package.
> (Incidentally it would also make rollbacks easier if the previous
> package is kept for a couple of days and solve a common complaint
> against Arch).
> 
Multiple versions are annoying, not only does it mean more overhead for
packaging it also doesn't make much sense for packages like Firefox,
etc. Most arch users want to use the latest version, if something breaks
you can always rollback with pacman -U or ( ARM ).

Supporting multiple versions of libraries seem unfeasable, how would we
handle rebuilds etc. Multiple versions of for example Apache aren't a
problem for me if they differ that much. 

Also your approach of multiple versions at the same time isn't as easy
as it looks I bet. 

P.S. Please use the S/MIME option for GnuPGP instead of inline.

-- 
Jelle van der Waa
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