[maemo-developers] Getting package with lower version into extras-testing

[From: Graham Cobb]

On Monday 12 October 2009 20:27:45 Cornelius Hald wrote:
> Now I have an update to the stable version with the version number
> 0.5.6. The extras autobuilder rejects this package because there is
> already a package with a higher version number in extras-devel.

I think that the best way to support two ongoing streams (say, a stable stream 
and a testing stream) is to give them two different package names.  This is 
the way debian handles things like kde3 and kde4 or the various versions of 
gcj.  This is particularly easy in Maemo because the user doesn't need to see 
the package name directly if you set a display name.

So, I would create two new packages: conboy0.5 and conboy0.6 (or, if you 
prefer, conboy-stable and conboy-testing).  The display names would be 
something like "Conboy (stable version)" and "Conboy (testing version)".

You should specify Conflicts in the control file so that they can both install 
the same files (assuming that you don't plan to support having both installed 
at the same time).

> On the summit someone was giving me the tip that I could prepend '1:' to
> the version number. That way the autobuilder would think it's newer, but
> the version number which is shown would remain the same.

No!  Unless I am very confused, using epochs is not a solution!  Once you use 
an epoch, the version with the epoch is later than all versions without the 
epoch.  So, if you have built 1:0.5.6 you will have to use version number 
1:0.6.0 to build the 0.6 version.  And if you do the same thing another day 
you will have to increement the epochs again.  That is not what the epoch 
mechanism is designed for: it is designed to fix version numbering mistakes 
or changes.

> So I changed the version number of my stable update to 1:0.5.6. Now the
> autobuilder did accept and build it. And it is available in
> extras-devel. The problem now seems to be that the web frontend for the
> promotion to extras-testing does it's own version number comparison. It
> still thinks that 0.6.0-alpha9 is the most recent version. So I cannot
> promote 1:0.5.6 to extras-testing.

That sounds like a bug in the promotion interface: it should handle epochs 
correctly.

Graham