[maemo-developers] The issue of version strings

[From: Anderson Lizardo]

On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 8:18 PM, Aniello Del Sorbo <anidel at gmail.com> wrote:
> Few people complained that Xournal 0.4.2.1-1fremantle13 was too long.
> I will make a diablo version as well (0.4.2.1-1diablo3).
>
> It's not my fault if Fremantle is a long name :P
> Anyway, suggestions?
>
> Bear in mind that 0.4.2.1-1fremantle13 is now in Extras, changing it
> will make it a new package?

I personally think that the length of version strings should not be QA
or "user friendliness" issue at all. Ideally, I think the application
manager should handle long version strings by itself. One idea is to
truncate the middle of a long string with "...", like several
applications do to e.g. URLs. Some heuristic could be added that
splits into common separators, such as +-~:

2.0.0+cvs20040908+mp4v2+bmp-0ubuntu6maemo1 -> 2.0.0+...-0ubuntu6maemo1

(although I think that in this case "ubuntu6" should be removed from
the version string, given that the previous debian/changelog entries
will take care of documenting the upstream vendor versions.)

And if strings like "0.4.2.1-1fremantle13", begin to become too long
for the UI to display properly, I think we might have a problem with
the application manager and not with the strings :)

Just my two cents,
-- 
Anderson Lizardo
OpenBossa Labs - INdT
Manaus - Brazil