[maemo-developers] The issue of version strings / improving Application manager view

[From: Juha Kallioinen]

ext Niels Breet wrote:
> On Thu, October 29, 2009 09:01, Martin Grimme wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>>
>> hmm, what's so bad about a simple date for a version number? Ubuntu does
>> it, (Open)Solaris does it, and I started doing it, too, because I found it
>> less confusing than having version numbers such as e.g. 0.96.5.
> 
> Sane version numbers should at least not look like this:
> 2.0.0+cvs20040908+mp4v2+bmp-0ubuntu6maemo1
> 
> And yes, this is an actual package version number ;)

And a perfectly good one too! :) It's useful not to change the upstream 
package version too much so that it's easier to see that a package could use 
updating.

The problem is imho the Application manager, not the version numbers.

What's the point of even displaying the version number in the Application 
manager's default view? I personally don't care about the version at all and 
I certainly won't remember if an application's version has been updated by 
looking at the list view. Am I alone with this opinion? Why do you need to 
see the version there? The update manager will gladly tell me if I have an 
older version installed and if I don't, won't I just install whatever the 
Application manager offers me?

The package version can anyways be found from the package details page, 
where there's more space available for it too.

A much more interesting bit of data instead of the package version to be 
shown by default might be the date when the package was uploaded. Also the 
Application manager could use a 'show new packages' view.

But these of course require changes to the Application manager and maybe 
even to apt/dpkg database to be able to show the package's date and are more 
difficult to implement than just making nicer version numbers.

Maybe a nice version number could really just be the date the package was 
created. That would fulfill my first wish, but we'd lose the upstream 
version trackability :)

Juha


-- 
Juha Kallioinen