Re: [PATCH setup] Allow setup to parse more than 3 versions from the setup.ini file

[Jon Turney <jon.turney@dronecode.org.uk>]

On 08/06/2015 20:24, Achim Gratz wrote:
> Corinna Vinschen writes:
>> I'm not against adding some functionality along these lines (provided
>> you also fix upset), but I'm not so sure about the broad definition of
>> the version state pattern.  It feels as generating problems down the
>> road.  Think setup.hint.  Your patch would requite to recognize more or
>> less any string as version state:
>
> Thats easily fixable by requiring a constant prefix ("ver-" or even just
> "v" looks like something that should work).

Agreed.

> But besides that issue I don't think that setup.exe makes this easily
> useable.  If I understand the motivation of John correctly, he'd want to
> keep an older version of the X server installable, or maybe as another
> example let's say I'd want to make it possible to keep perl-5.14 around
> for a while.  I don't think people would want to click on hundreds of
> chooser boxes until they have some set of old versions that are (or
> maybe not) working together.  This is only useful if that set of old
> packages can somehow be ganged together and switched all at once, IMHO.
> This probably means a meta-package that pulls in versioned dependencies.

That is indeed another piece of the puzzle, and something I intend on 
working on.

> The dirty little secret of setup is that it already has those versioned
> dependencies and can probably also deal with different dependencies for
> each trust level and replace packages (in other words, the obsoletiohn
> dance we're normally doing may be unnecessary).  It also has recommends,
> suggests, depends and conflicts.  These features have quite likely
> bit-rotted and documentation is almost non-existing, but they're already
> built in.

'never finished' rather than 'bit-rotted'