[dev] Version naming and PEAR installer

[Michael Rubinsky]

Quoting Gunnar Wrobel <wrobel at horde.org>:

>
> 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.

+1

--mike

The Horde Project (www.horde.org)
mrubinsk at horde.org