Re: MELPA version numbers

[Dmitry Gutov]

Resending.

Stefan Monnier <address@hidden> writes:

> [ As is sadly becoming the norm nowadays, it's difficult to find
>   a contact email address at http://melpa.milkbox.net/, so I send this
>   here instead, hoping someone here will know where to resend it for
>   me.  ]

AFAICT, the discussions mostly happen on GitHub issues. That way,
they're visible to the largest amount of users.

> A few times now I've heard people suffer from problems due to MELPA's
> use of incomparable version numbers: MELPA builds packages straight from
> a DVCS branch tip, so you get the "bleeding edge" and their build script
> ignores the package's own version number and instead just slaps
> a version number based on the current time, such as 20100105.123.
>
> This system makes sense, but if the package is also available (in it's
> "latest released version") via GNU ELPA or Marmalade, we have a problem
> because the two version numbers can't be compared correctly, and
> package.el doesn't even know it, so it just always picks MELPA's version
> (since 20100105.123 is "clearly" much more recent than say 2.3).
>
> This mess works surprisingly well in practice, since MELPA's versions
> are often at least as recent as the one on GNU ELPA or Maramalde (by virtue
> of being the bleeding edge from the DVCS).
>
> But if you ever stop using MELPA, all your MELPA-installed packages will
> stay non-updated for the foreseeable future since it'll take a while for
> foo.el to go from version 2.3 to version 20100106.0.
> And if for some reason the MELPA recipe points to an old DVCS
> unmaintained branch, you're similarly out of luck.
>
> One way out of this is to change the MELPA version numbers so that
> instead of ignoring the package's "2.3" and replacing it with
> "20100105.123", it should replace it with "2.3.20100105.123".

I like this approach in abstract, but if Melpa just switches to it, all
existing users will have to know somehow to reinstall all installed
packages manually. Otherwise, they won't ever update, for the same
reason as why you're bringing up this issue.

> WDYT?