Re: [Fedora-packaging] package release tag issue snapshot pre-release or post-release

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Sun, Jan 12, 2014 at 09:48:14PM +0530, Parag N(पराग़) wrote:
>  Hi,
>    I generally consider font packages to have release tag as snapshot
>  (pre-release) tag like
>  Pre-Release Packages: 0.%{X}.%{alphatag}
>    I have seen some font upstream don't change version but keep updating fonts
>  either by releasing new tarballs or in their VCS. If I say specific to google,
>  I think some of the google fonts are in hg or in the android source git which
>  have not seen any tarball release yet.
>    But if upstream source is greater than or equal to 1.x or 1.x.x, can we still
>  say its a snapshot pre-release release as no tarball available/released?
>    When I run following on my F20 Gnome desktop, I can see some results where
>  version is not < 1.x.x
>  
>  rpm -qa | grep "\-0.1.*git"
>   
Pre-release packages can be made for 1.x.x.  What this means is that
1.x.x has not yet been released but we expect that to be the version of the
next release.

>  Now the specific question what can be package release tag for
> https://
>  bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1049076 ?
>   
The situation is unclear to me.  If someoene is in contact with upstream
they could ask for a clarification of whether upstream considers 1.01 to
have been released already or if they are simply setting that version in
their version control systems in preparation for the next release (whenever
that occurs).

Lacking clarification from upstream, this could either be a pre-release or
a post-release.  You should be able to to recover gracefully from either
situation should you guess wrong so that's okay.

The only place where you could get into trouble is if upstream takes their
version number backwards.  This is a danger when the upstream has not
released a tarball yet (experience shows that upstreams tend to think of
things in source control as being "private" or "implementation detail"
even
if they are actively having people use it.  So something like a version
number that's only in files in source control could still be decremented
when upstream decides to announce a release).  For this reason, I've
sometimes used a version number "0" when upstream has never released
a tarball. But this boils down to a judgement call about what you think
upstream will do in the future.

-Toshio