Hi, I have a few questions about the versioning and distribution of GNU APL as it stands today:
1. Versioning GNU APL is apparently still officially '1.8'. Even after many, many bug fixes and enhancements, since the last official .tar.gz archive on the main GNU APL packages pages at https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/apl/ (dated 2019-06-23). What would constitute a v1.8.1, or v1.9? Is the SVN revision to be considered the de-facto 'build step' eg. v1.8.1775M? 2. git mirror commit comments lack any version and SVN revision info The official git repo mirroring svn has rather un-informative git commit comments, each one saying only "sync from SVN"; the output of `svnversion`, if nothing else, would be more useful as a git comment so that those using the git mirror would at least know what SVN version each commit represents, as discussions on this bug list seem to almost exclusively refer to the SVN version as the canonical identifier. 3. Availability of (more) up-to-date versions for downstream packaging systems Currently, according to the GNU APL site at ( https://www.gnu.org/software/apl/), to obtain a version of GNU APL more recent than the rather old one posted at https://www.gnu.org/software/apl/ (dated 2019-06-23) one is directed to either use SVN or the git repo which is synchronized with it directly. I'm trying to submit an update to the Funtoo Linux project to add GNU APL as a package in their 'ebuild' system. ebuild uses an 'autogen' tool with 'generators' which are canned methods of fetching from a few common types of web resources: currently github, gitlab (via their unique release- or tag-based APIs), or generic HTML directory listings of versioned tar.gz archives, such as the release directories published by GNU at the link in point 1. above. Funtoo doesn't currently appear to have a 'generator' for either direct SVN checkouts or git clones, so the two obvious ways to get a recent GNU APL source distribution are both inaccessible to its package manager. I'm trying to work with them to add a 'generator' that can fetch svn or git upstream repos directly, but if that fails, is there a particular reason why we could not or would not have periodic postings of newer tarballs to the GNU mirrors? Perhaps there are reasons why this isn't being done already, but I believe it would help promote the popularity and visibility of GNU APL if new releases were made available to Linux distros by making more recent release tarballs available. I'm willing to do the work on the package manager side for the Linux distros I use (Debian/Devuan and Funtoo), but it would be easier if there were 'official' up to date .tgz files for package manager tools to download :) Thanks, -Russ
