Simon McVittie <s...@debian.org> writes:
> Approach 1, which is (IMO) better when the changes you are making in
> experimental are truly experimental, like enabling features or patches
> whose medium-term future you're not sure about:
> 2.2.5-5+exp1, ... or -6~exp1, ... or whatever to experimental
> 2.2.5-6 to unstable
> Approach 2, which is (IMO) better when the changes you are making in
> experimental are the main line of development, and you're only not
> uploading to unstable because you're trying to avoid a freeze or getting
> tangled into a transition or something:
> 2.2.5-6, -7, ... to experimental
> 2.2.5-5+deb8u1 to unstable (if needed)
> (i.e. in approach 2 you're treating the unstable branch as
> stable-updates to a stable release that doesn't exist yet).
> Either can work. I've done both in the past.
Yes. To some extent it's a matter of style, and different people will
have different styles, and that's okay.
My personal feeling on this is that I believe people generally over-think
version numbers and add more complexity than is actually required. I
therefore have a personal rule that I use the simplest version numbers
that I can get away with in any situation. I've not seen much practical
reason to prefer the sequence:
2.2.5-6~exp1 (experimental)
2.2.5-6~exp2 (experimental)
2.2.5-7 (unstable)
to:
2.2.5-7 (experimental)
2.2.5-8 (experimental)
2.2.5-9 (unstable)
and the latter is simpler, so I pretty much always use that.
Either way, you have to do something "weird" if you need to upload
something to unstable from a different branch, particularly if you don't
want the unstable version to be newer than the experimental version (which
I almost never do).
The only argument that I've found convincing for putting an "exp" in the
experimental package versions is if they're *really* experimental, as in
"this may all be a horrible idea that I will disclaim in the morning"
sort of experimental, and it's really important to get that information in
front of the user in the version number.
But in general I think people are way too conservative about not just
using the next version number. Integers are cheap, and you won't ever run
out. :) It's akin to the problem of endless releases of software widely
used all over the world that still has a 0.x version number. Just call it
1.0 already.
--
Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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