Jason Gunthorpe wrote: > On Mon, 18 Sep 2000, Joey Hess wrote: > > > Actually, I would prefer not to use numbers in the actual Packages file. We > > should use a textual representation; implementations can convert to > > numbers as needed. Contrast with the Priority field. Of course this > > messes with your idea of continually incrementing numbers. > > Well, that is completely unworkable :| > > If each version has a unique priority realitive to the previous version > then we no longer have the information. Consider my example: > > Ver=1.0 Urgency=0 Urgency=low > Ver=1.1 Urgency=100 Urgency=high > Ver=1.2 Urgency=200 Urgency=high > Ver=1.3 Urgency=300 Urgency=high > Ver=1.4 Urgency=300 Urgency=low > > Now lets say the user has 1.0 installed and v1.4 available. They have no > way to know that there has been *3* security fixes! Without a way to > maintain a history across every version it is impossible to know what has > happened in the versions you can no longer see [1.1 to 1.3 in this > example]. That reduces the usability of the feature to about the level > of a cheap hack..
I know. I hope someone comes up with a way to make it work. The control file has always been human readable, and we shouldn't change that. > > And the changelog probably is the right place as far as the source > > package goes. It's annoying to force people to edit the control file > > It must go in the control file or dpkg will not put it in the status > file. Er, tools can be changed. dpkg-gencontrol can grab this filed from the changelog. We already get enough oops-LAST-version-was-HIGH-priority-not-this-one uploads with it in the changelog. Putting it in the control file will just make them more common. > Urgency in the changelog is explicitly relative to the last release, we > need an absolute urgency so we can perform meaningful comparisions across > time. > > The trick is that we encode the relative urgency from the change log into > the difference between numbers. > > You could probably compute the urgency value from the change log just by > summing all the urgencies of each release. Taking care to never truncate > the changelog. That would be a (hackish) start, but it doesn't address keeping the control file human readable. If this is the best we can do, we should probably not bother -- package pools can yeild some of the same behavior. -- see shy jo
