Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Arwed von Merkatz <v.merkatz AT gmx.net>]

On Sat, May 07, 2005 at 09:12:27PM -0500, Jeremy Blosser (emrys) wrote:
> On May 07, Arwed von Merkatz [v.merkatz AT gmx.net] wrote:
> > First of all: If any other spell depends on a specific version of spell
> > A then spell A _must not_ allow other versions. This means that the
> > current apr/apr-util spells are broken as the apache2 spell requires the
> > 0.9.x versions of them. In such cases the different versions should be
> > provided by seperate spells, see ffmpeg/ffmpeg-cvs for another example
> > where this is required.
> 
> Why would we do it this way instead of allowing spells to depend on
> specific versions of other spells?  (This is a basic enough question I
> assume there's some past discussion of it that predates me by quite a bit.)

This was discussed a lot and postponed for after 1.0.

> If we have multiple spells to support multiple versions it forces uses to
> always look at what all is available before they cast something by the
> obvious name, which does *not* promote "letting users know what to expect".
> 
> > Now for the actual versioned spell. The essential differences between
> > the spells we currently have:
> > - some spells default to stable version, some to cvs version
> ...
> > What I'd like to see:
> > - spell asks which version to use, always defaulting to the stable
> >   version
> 
> I agree when the options are just "stable release" and "daily snapshot",
> but what about spells with active stable, devel/beta, and cvs branches?  In
> those cases the devel branch can at times pass the stable branch in
> stability as well as features, and we don't necessarily do our users favors
> by just following what can be arbitrary version schemes.

Then the user wanting those features can choose the devel version and
be done with it. No spell should default to cvs/svn (unless that's the
only way to get it of course) because we can't give _any_ guarantees
that those trees will build/be compatible with other stuff.

-- 
Arwed v. Merkatz                              Source Mage GNU/Linux developer
                                                    http://www.sourcemage.org