[Chicken-users] Need an explanation of egg version dependencies

[Christian Kellermann]

Dear fellow chicken fans,

I recently stumbled on a strange issue with chicken-install. It
complained rightly that when installing the lookup-table egg about
missing a newer version of the check-error egg.

After investigating a while I found the following things that where
not obvious to me:

1. The check-errors egg when fetched by henrietta reports version
1.0.0 in its setup file

2. henrietta will retrieve the right version if asked for it and
if the tag directory extists

3. The chicken-install script will override the version given in
the setup file when specifying a version string, e.g. chicken-install
check-errors:1.6.0

So just issueing a 'chicken-install check-errors' will install you
the version 1.6.0 disguised as version 1.0.0!

Now since the setup files in the check-errors svn repo all show
"1.0.0" I am confused about the intention behind it.  This behaviour
would make sense if 1.0.0 is considered the stable version everyone
should use, then the dependency of lookup-table is a bug.  If that
is not intended then leaving in the old version string is a bug
since it breacks chicken-install's dependency resolution.

There are several other eggs that show the same behaviour (locale
for example with '0.0.0').

So we either need a new mechanism for chicken-install to choose the
latest version or fix those strings, as I see it now.

Which way is the right to turn to in this case?

Kind regards,

Christian