On Mon, Jun 01, 2015 at 05:34:28PM +0200, 7heo wrote: > I personally understand your problem (I shortly contributed to alpine and had > to report problems upstream, and I was more than glad when they accepted to > merge my patches upstream, so I hear you), but I still think that arbitrary > versions are the wrong approach. Arbitrary versions exist only so marketing > departments all over the world can charge customers for a "new" product. > Developers work with version-control systems, which aren't using anything > close to arbitrary, semantically. > > So yeah, it would solve your problem in the short term, but it would also > encourage bad practices, which is a real problem on the long run. > > Let's drop versions. Especially in the case of suckless, where software > configuration is achieved via compilation, and thus where packages are > counter productive.
Me and others do not think that packages are counter productive. As I said in another mail, if you drop versions, package maintainer will start rolling own versions or will start using/tagging random VCS revisions. > So TL;DR: it's not hard, it's just wrong. No matter if this is wrong or not, with most distributions packages and versions are there and will not go away soon. Regards, Joerg > On June 1, 2015 5:07:15 PM CEST, Joerg Jung <m...@umaxx.net> wrote: > >Hi, > > > >you are both wrong. > > > >On Mon, Jun 01, 2015 at 04:39:39PM +0200, 7heo wrote: > >> My point exactly. Plus, it does not even solve an actual problem. > > > >It does, it makes life for downstream package maintainers (like me) > >easier, as no cherry-picking of patches or own releases are required. > > > >> On June 1, 2015 4:33:55 PM CEST, "Martti Kühne" <mysat...@gmail.com> > >wrote: > >> >No it wouldn't help downstream package maintainers. > > > >It helps, see above. > > > >> >You're right in that package maintainers can't tell where the fixes > >> >and new features are coming in, they'll not introduce their own > >> >releases. > > > >Right, you disproved your own sentence above. > > > >> >However upstream is not everyone's taste either, > > > >The default setting match the taste of *enough* people, so that it is > >worthwhile to roll a package based on releases. This is proven by > >the available packages in the various distributions. > > > >> > in that configuration > >> > changes require recompiling of the respective binary. > > > >There are package managers which allow very easy re-compiling of > >packages with own patch-sets, especially due to projects like suckless. > >Several people, still prefer re-compiling of packages based on the > >given > >releases. Because from sysadmin point of view, packages are always > >wanted and preferred over random source builds. > > > >> >Releases hence make sense for software that fits everyone's needs > >with > >> >their configuration files, which is untrue either for most suckless > >> >projects. > > > >Releases make sense for several reasons, even for suckless projects and > >and adding a tag is not hard, right? > > > >Regards, > >Joerg > > >
