[dev] Version naming and PEAR installer

[Gunnar Wrobel]

Zitat von Jan Schneider <jan at horde.org>:

> 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?

The latter.

While I consider "5.0.0alpha1" to be far less readable than  
"5.0-alpha" I get the impression that this change would only really  
affect the "pre-stable" versions. Our former imp-h4-5.0.tar.gz would  
now be imp-5.0.0.tar.gz and something we would have released as  
imp-h4-5.0.1.tar.gz would now be imp-5.0.1.tgz. So once we are in the  
"stable" situation the numbers match quite well. And that is the phase  
that I would say matters most. Somebody willing to try the alpha can  
be expected to deal with a version number that does not match to the  
old scheme.

I think dropping the "h4" mark is more significant than the version  
numbering. But as you mentioned in a recent commit: "We need to drop  
the hN- prefix for package tarballs. Not so much of a problem since we  
manage dependencies through PEAR now anyway."

So I'm in favor of switching to the PEAR scheme.

Cheers,

Gunnar

>
> Jan.
>
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