Subject: Releases other than by the package maintainer

From: Ian Jackson <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 10 Aug 96 16:47 BST

There are a couple of circumstances when a new version of a package
needs to be released by someone other than the usual maintainer:

 * Architecture-specific patches which need to be integrated.
 * Maintainer is away or can't do it for some other reason.
 * Urgent security and other fixes.

I propose that we should mandate:
 (a) a broad description of when you should and when you shouldn't do
     this, and how not to tread on the usual maintainer's toes.
 (b) that the non-usual-maintainer releases should use a particular
     revision format: eg, hello-1.3-8 would become hello-1.3-8.1.

Ian.

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 12 Aug 1996 10:35:06 +0200 (MET DST)

>      revision format: eg, hello-1.3-8 would become hello-1.3-8.1.

Seems very right to me.  But I would like to add the following to it.

When mainstream is updated, hello-1.3 -> hello-1.4
Non-usual-maintainer updates, hello-1.3-8 -> hello-1.4-0.1
Usual-maintainer updates, hello-1.3-8 -> hello-1.4-1

Usual-maintainer should never use -0 for revisions.
And if we agree on this, it should be mandated in the manual.

Erick

sorry for cc

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From: Ian Jackson <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 13 Aug 96 14:11 BST

[email-masked] writes ("Re: Releases other than by the
package maintainert"):
> [Ian Jackson:]

I think this seems reasonable.  I propose to mandate it.

Any objections, considerations ?

Ian.

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From: Rob Browning <[email-masked]>
Date: 13 Aug 1996 13:22:49 -0500

> Any objections, considerations ?

Doesn't this open up the file naming question again.  I.e. before we
could say definitively that 

xxx_yyy-zzz.aaa

meant package xxx, uppstream yyy, and debian revision zzz with the aaa
stuff being the deb/tar.gz/diff.gz stuff (did I get that right?).
Doesn't the extra dot separated field invalidate this heuristic?  Or
is that just the wrong heuristic?

Just wanted to make sure we could still parse file names easily.  I
know that most of the time the info should be gathered from the
package itself, but there are times when using the name is extremely
helpful.

--
Rob

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 14 Aug 1996 09:25:34 +0200 (MET DST)

> could say definitively that 

STOP STOP, MY MISTAKE (I meant _) SORRY SORRY, let's continue.

Erick