Re: debian package status

[Pedro Kroger]

* Mats Bengtsson (address@hidden) wrote:
> I don't know about the package naming conventions in Debian, but
> wouldn't it be better to use a name like lilypond (without version
> number) for the stable versions and lilypond-unstable (or whatever)
> for the unstable versions. Otherwise, you will in principle need a new
> "Replaces" statement for each new major revision of LilyPond.

that's true. Debian handles cases like this in 2 different ways. One
is the "snapshot" package, (like in mozilla-snapshot) that is what you
described (except that the snapshot usually refer to cvs
snapshots). The other way is appending versioning numbers like I did.

Initially I was inclined to name it "lilypond-snapshot" or
"lilypond-unstable" like you suggested, but I realized that it would
be good to be able to have different major versions installed at the
same time. For instance: suppose you typeseted a complex piece with
lily 2.0 in the past and need a pdf right away. Now you use lilypond
2.2. Suppose that convert-ly did its job but still remains a few (or a
lot) of things to be corrected and re-tweaked. Of course the right
thing to do is to convert to newer versions, but if you are short of
time and just want to print, wouldn't be good if you had previous
version installed?

That's the way debian handles python, for example. Debian has packages
for python1.5, python2, python2.1, python2.2, and so on.

Of course the drawback of this approach is that the user has to
specifically uninstall older versions, if he/she wishes.

Pedro