Trying to make sense of all the X modular packages

[Adam Jackson]

On Friday 11 November 2005 00:05, Daniel Stone wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 10, 2005 at 08:56:19PM -0800, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> > Daniel Stone wrote:
> > | This is AIUI, but I'm pretty sure it's correct.
> > |
> > | Tarballs with changes will get new versions rolled by their maintainers
> > | if the maintainer wants.
> > |
> > | The maintainers can then nominate given tarballs for the next release.
> > | As most of the modules we have now don't have clearly-defined
> > | maintainers, this will be largely automatic and probably done by the
> > | release managers.
> >
> > Last time this came up, all tarballs that were part of an official
> > release would be "tagged" in their names with X11R7.0 or X11R7.1 or
> > something. So that would require full repackaging at every release.
> >
> > Has that changed, or is there some way around it?
>
> I believe the way we're doing it now is putting tarballs into the
> /tarballs/ directory, and then symlinking, say,
> xf86-video-ati-1.0.0.1.tar.gz from
> ../rc1/xf86-video-ati-X11R7.0RC1-1.0.0.1.tar.gz.  But I could be wrong
> on this one.

This is actually a good question.

There's a release version macro that munges the name of the tarball generated 
by 'make distcheck' to include an X release string.  Also, by autotool 
convention, everything to the left of '.tar' is the package name, and 
therefore also the name of the directory you'll create when you unpack the 
tarball.

So the problem is this.  If we have a component (say, twm) that doesn't change 
between 7.0 and 7.1, then in 7.0 the package name would be:

twm-X11R7.0-1.0.0.tar.gz  ->  twm-X11R7.0-1.0.0/

If we just symlink that file across for 7.1, then we'd get:

twm-X11R7.1-1.0.0.tar.gz  ->  twm-X11R7.0-1.0.0/

And now we have a mismatch between package name and directory name.  We could 
probably munge it like so:

twm-X11R7.0-1.0.0.tar.gz  ->  twm-1.0.0/

Which I personally like but which is probably a pain for packagers to deal 
with.  I know for gentoo that would involve sedding the X11RX.Y string out of 
${D}, there's probably similar pain for other packaging systems.

There's also the issue that regenerating the tarball afresh for every release 
is potentially more work for packagers, since now you have to check new 
md5sums (since the directory name changes) etc.  But otoh, you don't actually 
_have_ to do that for every component, since if it didn't change in 7.1 
there's no harm in using the packaging for 7.0.

I don't have a strong preference here, I just know that when I cut a release I 
get to upload everything.  If there's a solution out there that makes 
distro's lives easier then I'm all for it.

- ajax
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