Re: ncurses version

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

On 31/01/2024 20:45, Brian Inglis via Cygwin-apps wrote:
> On 2024-01-31 10:36, ASSI via Cygwin wrote:
>> Jon Turney via Cygwin writes:
>>> If upstream really is making multiple releases called '6.4', which
>>> we're supposed to distinguish by some other means, then there aren't
>>> really any good answers...
> 
>> There's only one official 6.4 release, but just about everyone packages
>> one of the roughly weekly snapshots inbetween releases (depending on
>> where you are looking they are also called beta versions), which are
>> named 6.4-yyyymmdd upstream.  We can't have a "-" in the version number,
>> hence the suggestion to replace it with a "+".
> 
> [moving discussion to -apps]
> 
> Upstream developer is Thomas Dickey at invisible-island.net so no git.
> 
> My only concern is if 6.4+20240203-1 !> 6.4-20240120 as strvercmp test 
> beds disagree, presumably about the effect of the delimiter, possibly 
> because the + may be treated similarly to a prefix for an RC preceding 
> the 6.4 release?
> 
> For guidance I have looked at:
> 
>      https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/packaging-guidelines/Versioning/
> 
> which states that ~ prefixes pre-stable "snapshot" releases and ^ 
> prefixes post-stable "snapshot" releases where . or nothing prefixes 
> upstream bugfix or patch level releases, so perhaps we should just use 
> version suffix .yyyymmdd?

So, this is notionally defined here [1].

The important point there "Non-alphanumeric separators for these 
contiguous chunks are ignored" (after identifying chunks)

So '1.2.3' '1+2+3' and '1_2_3' are all equal.

[1] https://cygwin.com/packaging-package-files.html#naming

Practically, this is controlled by the version comparison which libsolv 
does, which I am expecting to also work like that.

(Perhaps naively. All the details are paged-out at the moment. I think I 
remember there's a flag which you have to give it to turn on the special 
behaviour of tilde and caret, which in any case aren't currently in the 
character set permitted for a cygwin package name)

> I have downloaded and locally installed Fedora rpmdevtools package but 
> Cygwin python rpm module seems to lack labelCompare():
> 
> $ rpmdev-vercmp 6.4+20240203-1 6.4-20240120
> /usr/local/lib/python3.9/site-packages/rpm.py:15: UserWarning: The RPM 
> Python bindings are not currently available via PyPI.

This can't be cygwin's python rpm module if it's in /usr/local/, I think?

If you have calm installed, you can use:

> $ calm-tool sort-versions 1.2.1 1.2.3 1+2+3 1_2_3 1.2.4
> 1.2.1
> 1.2.3 1+2+3 1_2_3
> 1.2.4

At this point it should be clear that 6.4+2024012 is greater than 6.4.

> How are Cygwin pre-stable RC releases defined differently from 
> post-stable snapshot releases and upstream patch releases?

Generally, I think that following [2], as linked from that, is a good 
idea. i.e.

for pre-release versions use R="0." followed by  something that's going 
to increase as prereleases do e.g. date or an incrementing ordinal and 
then a githash.

for post-releases you can increment R and add a similar identifier.

You can instead add things to V to indicate post-label snapshots, but 
there's there's a risk of coming unstuck unless the upstream versioning 
scheme is totally predicable (i.e. if you create 1.2+3 for a 
post-release fix to 1.2, and then upstream releases a 1.2a which you 
weren't expecting because they've never done it before, you're boned)

[2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Package_Versioning_Examples