[Chicken-hackers] Taming the egg versioning wilderness

[Moritz Heidkamp]

Fellow Chickeneers,

I just had the following problem (again): I tagged a new version of the
lowdown egg (0.0.6). While doing so I realized that the previous tag
(0.0.5) still installed itself as 0.0.4 via the install-extension
invocation in its .setup file. This lead me to think over the whole
situation of how we deal with egg versioning and I found it pretty
error-prone and inconvenient for both users and authors. Sticking to my
example:

1) Users get confused because if they run chicken-install lowdown (or
   even chicken-install lowdown:0.0.5), chicken-status will afterwards
   tell them that 0.0.4 is installed in this case.

2) Authors have to be vigilant to always keep three places in sync: The
   version in the .setup file (another issue here is that each
   invocation of install-extension and install-program require the
   version to be passed -- hopefully it's always the same one), the
   version in the .release-info file and (if a VCS is used, which is
   usually the case) the version in the tag name.

It may of course be that I misunderstand some intentions of the
versioning system as it is (e.g. why it is possible to install multiple
extensions and programs with differing versions from within an egg which
itself can have yet another differing version). If that's the case I'd
be happy to be enlightened about it!

Otherwise I'd suggest to somehow get rid of at least the versions in the
.setup file. Maybe it would be possible to make them optional and use
the egg's version as a default in this case?

Let me know what your thoughts are on this issue. I am happy to try to
come up with a patch should we agree on how to proceed.


Thanks!
Moritz