[Releasing] [Development] brown paper bag issue in Qt 5.6.1 packages

Thiago Macieira thiago.macieira at intel.com
Wed Jun 22 07:50:18 CEST 2016


On quarta-feira, 22 de junho de 2016 05:03:28 PDT Jani Heikkinen wrote:
> That's why we need to update the packages just with that one fix. And that's
> why it isn't new 5.6.2 release (in my opinion), it is just 5.6.1 + hotfix.

That's still "the next release after 5.6.1 without new features", so it's 
5.6.2.

> And what comes to tag: we have used '-1' tag earlier (in enterprise
> repositories) and we didn't see any reason to change that 'hotfix' tagging

I don't care what you've done in enterprise repositories since they are not 
visible and the Qt community wasn't consulted. We also have a rule that only 
the Qt Project can create new version numbers, so enterprise releases need to 
have a field to annotate differentiations: that's the part after the dash.

The binary packages also don't count. That's again exactly what the part after 
the dash is for: it notes what the different build (release) of that 
particular source code version is.

But the source packages cannot have a dash. There's no discussion to be had 
here.

See also what QVersionNumber does:
 QVersionNumber::fromString("5.6.1") < QVersionNumber::fromString("5.6.1-1')
is false

> scheme. It was discussed in irc as well but at least for me no-one really
> says why '-1' pattern is wrong. There was just opinions for and against and
> because we have used '-1' tag earlier it was selected this time as well.

We have never used a dash in the version number itself. Separation for "rc" 
and "beta" has never been a problem, though I'm sure many of our downstream 
would have liked us to use version numbers like 5.7.90, 5.7.99, etc. in the 
source for those.

> Another reason was the package naming: We have some tools which cannot
> handle 5.6.1.1 but can handle 5.6.1-1 in package names and it is better to
> use same format in the tag what is used in package names.

We have tools that can't handle 5.6.1-1, but can handle 5.6.1.1. More 
importantly, we have tools that can't handle either, like the configure script, 
which produces QT_VERSION.

Conclusion: both 5.6.1.1 and 5.6.1-1 are bad ideas. Let's use the correct 
version number: 5.6.2.

> But if there is really some reason why v5.6.1-1 don't work and v.5.6.1.1
> would work then it is really ok for me to change the tag. But let's don't
> change that just because of opinions...

5.6.1-1 does not work in Linux packages. The part after the dash is reserved 
for the distribution packages themselves, like the our binary packages as 
discussed above. For example, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed currently has Qt packages 
with version 5.6.0-1.1, the KDE::Qt56 repositories are providing 5.6.2-5.1, 
KDE:Qt57 has 5.7.0-35.1.

That means release 1.1 of Qt's 5.6.0 source code. Traditionally, the release 
number resets to 1 when a source version number changes, but is rev'ved up 
whenever you make changes to the scripts that produce the packages. Like our 
binaries.

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com
  Software Architect - Intel Open Source Technology Center




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