Re: Versioned releases

[Bernhard Voelker]

On 2020-06-04 20:19, Bruno Haible wrote:
> Indeed e.g. Debian has a gnulib "package":
>   https://packages.debian.org/sid/all/gnulib/filelist
> 
> But I think it's a red herring, since basically no one is using gnulib
> this way.

I agree, it's not really useful: e.g. I'm using openSUSE:Tumbleweed,
a rolling release with almost the latest and greatest.  But still,
the version of it is already >260 commits behind (from 2020-02-16).

Well, the 'gnulib-docs' package integrates well, but some content
is already outdated - especially the newer, interesting parts.

I guess that other, non-rolling distros come with much older and
therefore even more useless versions.

> You mean, a distributor wants to determine which of the coreutils,
> findutils, gawk, gettext, etc. package use the Gnulib before 2018-09-23?
> This is nontrivial, but not because Gnulib does not have a version
> number, but because it's shipped as a source-code library - something that
> we don't want to change.

Well, the projects using gnulib (via git submodule) could at least generate
the 'git describe' value into their NEWS file or other documentation.
And gnulib could provide helpers for that.

Still, that wouldn't help in the case the packager adds a downstream
patch for gnulib files.  Well, that same patch could include add a note
for it in the docs as well.

Have a nice day,
Berny