[Pkg-octave-devel] [OctDev] When are release versions bumped?

[David Bateman]

Søren Hauberg wrote:
> søn, 11 05 2008 kl. 23:40 +0200, skrev Thomas Weber:
>   
>> I'm about to update the forge packages in Debian, but noted something
>> surprising. The control package had no code changes in 2008, but its
>> version went from 1.0.4 to 1.0.6 during the releases. 
>>
>> Is this intentional?
>>     
>
> I don't remember the details of this package, but sometimes we have been
> forced to bump version numbers even if no code changes have happened.
> This is related to the scripts we use to make the releases. As an
> example, it seems that my version of 'svn2cl' doesn't generate the exact
> same output as Davids version does (at least that's how I remember
> things). So, if David released version X of a package I might need to
> release version X+1 later on even if no code has been changed -- simply
> because the ChangeLog has changed.
>   
yes that is the issue we have between Soren and myself.. Maybe we could
exclude the changelog from the test whether a version number needs to be
bumped... The  code to check this is in octave-forge/packages/Makefile
> So, things aren't perfect right now. At some point in the future it
> would be nice if we didn't have to make releases of Octave-Forge. It
> would be better if the individual package maintainers released their own
> packages independently. Then we wouldn't see the kind of 'random'
> version bumbs that you've noticed.
>   
This would be ideal.. However as it stands the webpages have
documentation for particular versions of the packages and so the website
is entirely updated at the same time as an octave-forge release. I'm not
sure how that can be managed if the package owners themselves were
responsible for the release. Also I believe distributions like Debian
would prefer to deal is a monolithic tar-ball rather than individual
source packages and so even if the individual packages were released
independently, there would probably remain a need for the monolithic
releases.

Regards
David

-- 
David Bateman                                David.Bateman at motorola.com
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