On Wed, 2008-09-10 at 11:49 -0400, Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH wrote:
On 2008 Sep 10, at 6:48, Wolfgang Jeltsch wrote:
Am Mittwoch, 10. September 2008 11:47 schrieben Sie:
So we should think about how to make it less confusing. Perhaps like distributors use an extra revision number we should do the same.
Yes, maybe this is the way to go.
Everyone who manages packages runs into this, and all of them use revision numbers like this. (.rN for gentoo was already mentioned; BSD ports and MacPorts use _, RPM uses -. Depot collections at CMU also use -.)
And while we're on that topic, most of them also have an "epoch" which overrides the version number. If for some reason an updated package *doesn't* change the version, or goes backwards (because of a major bug leading to backing off the new release), you increase the epoch so dependent packages don't get confused when it's re-released. If we're considering modifying hackage's versioning, we should probably decide if we want/need this now instead of having to add it in later when something major goes *boom*.
We've thought about this and we think we do not need epoch numbers since we're in the lucky position of doing the upstream versioning. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/135 Hmm, I think the discussion on that ticket must have been in an email thread in cabal-devel. Duncan