[dev] Version naming and PEAR installer

[Chuck Hagenbuch]

Quoting Michael Rubinsky <mrubinsk at horde.org>:

> 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

Agreed.

-chuck