Re: [Lynx-dev] unpacked directory name

[Bela Lubkin]

Philip Webb wrote:

> 080518 Thomas Dickey wrote:
> > On Sun, 18 May 2008, Philip Webb wrote:
> >> Is it difficult to use a new dir name when tarring version files ?
> > no - that's simply been the convention for lynx ("forever").
> > I can change it.
> 
> There have been 2 objections, one of which I've just responded to,
> the other seemed off the point, so I hope you will continue to consider it.

I'll put in a vote on Philip's side.  This has been annoying me for
years, but I never thought to speak up.

Obviously lynx2.8.7dev.9.tar.bz2 should unpack into lynx2.8.7dev.9/.
Almost all packages this straight congruence between tarball name and
unpack directory (e.g. linux-2.6.25.4.tar.bz2 -> linux-2.6.25.4/...)

> Another version-number issue is the persistence of 'dev' versions
> -- since time immemorial (smile) -- , where other projects change numbers.
> On Gentoo at least, this results in the latest version being way out-of-date,
> as they don't treat 'dev' versions as full-scale releases, which they are,
> so that I continue to have to install them myself in  /usr/local .
> Is there any problem with calling each new version from now on
> '2.8.7', '2.8.8', '2.8.9' etc (yes, '2.8.100' if it gets that far) ?

TD has a warboard of bugs he's working on [by "warboard" I mean
"whatever actual structure he uses to keep track of it all, maybe in his
head, maybe email boxes, who knows what it is, but it seems to work
pretty well"].  I think he only declares a "release" version when the
list of outstanding bugs has become short & benign enough.  Since this
isn't a commercial project, there's less of a market heartbeat demanding
regular releases.

Yet the effect Philip describes is real -- many distros (of all sorts,
not just Linux) skip the "dev" / "pre" series as unreliable prerelease
materials.  This results in the vast preponderance of preinstalled Lynx
binaries in the universe being substantially backrev from the state of
the art.  It really would be good if there was a declared "Use This One"
version a little more often than the 1.6 years since Lynx 2.8.6 was
declared...

It also doesn't help that the version number increments are tiny (+.0.1),
and of course this is a project that most distro maintainers are
thinking "What, you still use _that_??!?"

>Bela<