Warren's Package Naming Proposal - Revision 2

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Nov 10, 2003, Pozsar Balazs <pozsy at uhulinux.hu> wrote:

>> Release: 2.8
>> Prerelease: 2.8pre1   (Prerelease of version 2.9)

> Could you give me an example of this? (Imho this scheme is
> braindamaged...) I've never seen any projects with this versioning.

Autotools (autoconf, automake and libtool) have agreed to use such a
scheme quite a while ago, and one of the reasons behind such a scheme
was exactly to accomodate RPM's versioning rules.

Say libtool 1.4.2a was a CVS snapshot out of the 1.4 branch right
after release 1.4.2; 1.4.2b was a semi-stable released snapshot
leading towards 1.4.3.  1.4.2c was a CVS snapshot after 1.4.2b, etc,
with `odd' letters being used for CVS snapshots and `even' letters
used for tarballs released out of alpha.gnu.org.

Meanwhile, mainline was be versioned 1.4a, meaning it targeted release
1.5.  1.4b was a semi-stable released snapshot, 1.4c was again a CVS
snapshot.

At some points right after cutting a branch, we'd have something like
1.4.0a, to distinguish it from 1.4a, and to make it clear it's leading
towards 1.4.1.

I no longer remember the exact details, so I may have got something
wrong, but the scheme actually makes some sense, given the design
constraints.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva   Enjoy Guarana', see http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Red Hat GCC Developer                 aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}
CS PhD student at IC-Unicamp        oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist                Professional serial bug killer