[Mongrel] The Debian Plan - reloaded

[Chad Woolley]

On 1/15/07, Filipe <filipe at icewall.org> wrote:
> On Sat, 13 Jan 2007, Chad Woolley wrote:
>
> >> Hum... then -rc1? :D Well, I take a look at this when generating the rake
> >> task.
> >
> > I *THINK* this is not the rubygems standard.  See this:
> >
> > http://rubygems.org/read/chapter/16

...

> > 1. Why does debian or apt need to distinguish between release
> > candidates?  Is this automatically tied to -dev packages or something?
>
> No, it's just because we've a file called watch, with this content:
>
> http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/releases/gems/mongrel-([0-9\.]*)\.gem
>
> And a tool that checks the site and remind me that there is a new
> version.
>
> Ow, and the package version in debian always has the same version than
> upstream. So I thought it is someway stranger to have a release
> candidate package called "1.0".

I do agree this is rather strange, but it's not unheard of.  In any
case, I don't think it's appropriate for a packaging system to try to
enforce constraints on the versioning standards of the the software it
packages.

See this for all the various flavors of versioning standards:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Version#Software_versioning_schemes

Some of these allow identification of pre-release or beta versions
while still conforming to the RubyGems standard.  For example, the
Linux versioning approach (odd numbers for development releases, even
for stable) would be compatible:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Version#Odd-numbered_versions_for_development_releases

HOWEVER, the linux approach WOULD cause problems when you consider
that RubyGems own version specification approach is primitive - you
can only say things like "> x.y" or "<= x.y"

I'll point this thread out to the RubyGems list, I'm curious what they
would have to say.  At a minimum, I think the RubyGems versioning
standard docs could use some clarification.

-- Chad