[dev] Version naming and PEAR installer

[Jan Schneider]

Hi,

since the default installation method for Horde 4 will be through the  
PEAR installer, I've played a lot with its channel support recently.

I noticed that the PEAR installer doesn't support the versioning  
scheme that we used so far. Instead of:

IMP H4 (5.0-ALPHA) resp. imp-h4-5.0-alpha.tar.gz

the PEAR standards require version names like:

5.0.0alpha1 resp. imp-5.0.0alpha1.tgz

To the rescue comes a feature of the PEAR installer that allows to add  
custom package validators for channels. Unfortunately, this feature  
obviously has never been tested and is completely broken. So much that  
you can't either build nor install packages that use a custom validator.
So I've fixed the PEAR installer too, as well as the PEAR server that  
didn't play nicely with our version names either. I'm confident that  
those fixes will be incorporated with their next releases.

BUT! This would require anyone installing Horde to upgrade to an (yet  
to be released) PEAR version first. This could be done through a  
dependency in our packages, so the user will get notified about that,  
etc. But he still has to upgrade. OTOH some users might need to  
upgrade anyway, since we require some level of channel support. The  
minimum installer version we currently require (even though this  
version hasn't really been tested with Horde yet) is 1.7.0. Some  
distributions still provide earlier versions.

So, the question is, do we want to stick to our well established  
version naming, to make the transition from H3 to H4 easier for users  
that are already used to our versioning?
Or do we change to PEAR versioning style, to lower dependencies for  
installing Horde?

Jan.

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