[geos-devel] 3.0.2

[Greg Troxel]

Chris Hodgson <chodgson at refractions.net> writes:

> Is this why some projects do RCs? ;)
>
> 3.0.1RC1, 3.0.1RC2, 3.0.1RC3?
>
> Or was Frank only suggesting this for the 3.1.0 level of release?
>
> Would these little issues happening in an RC-release cause less
> problems for packagers? At least it would save us the "version creep"
> (if we care).

(Speaking as the pkgsrc maintainer for geos and postgis.)

The issue is that once there is a foo-x.y.z.tar.gz out there (a
'distfile' in pkgsrc speak), and a packaging system references it, a
checksum of the distfile is stored and the wrapper build scripts are
tuned to that particular exact distfile.  Then mirror sites fetch the
distfile and store it.  If the distfile changes, the checksum will not
match.  To work around the file changing, in pkgsrc we assign
DIST_SUBDIR to a new directory so that the old cached contents will be
ignore.

I don't have any problem with "version creep"; we have an infinite
supply of even small integers.  I don't think it matters much if one
uses an rcN suffix or just increments the numbers.

In this case, it seems 3.0.2 has been regenerated with the right dir, so
I'll just package that - because I didn't package the older 3.0.2 it
doesn't matter.


pkgsrc guide says:

  19.2.2. How to handle modified distfiles with the 'old' name

  Sometimes authors of a software package make some modifications after
  the software was released, and they put up a new distfile without
  changing the package's version number. If a package is already in
  pkgsrc at that time, the checksum will no longer match. The contents
  of the new distfile should be compared against the old one before
  changing anything, to make sure the distfile was really updated on
  purpose, and that no trojan horse or so crept in. Please mention that
  the distfiles were compared and what was found in your commit
  message. Then, the correct way to work around this is to set
  DIST_SUBDIR to a unique directory name, usually based on
  PKGNAME_NOREV. All DISTFILES and PATCHFILES for this package will be
  put in that subdirectory of the local distfiles directory. (See
  Section 19.1.11, "How to handle incrementing versions when fixing an
  existing package" for more details.) In case this happens more often,
  PKGNAME can be used (thus including the nbX suffix) or a date stamp
  can be appended, like ${PKGNAME_NOREV}-YYYYMMDD. Do not forget
  regenerating the distinfo file after that, since it contains the
  DIST_SUBDIR path in the filenames. Also increase the PKGREVISION if
  the installed package is different.  Furthermore, a mail to the
  package's authors seems appropriate telling them that changing
  distfiles after releases without changing the file names is not good
  practice.
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