PortGroup versioning

[Richard L. Hamilton]

Can you think of anything, esp. edge cases, that might break if you didn't change the PortGroup version, that wouldn't break (but might require otherwise not strictly needed rebuilds) if you did change the version? 

Can you test any that you think of?

Are all the repositories reliably consistent/compatible?

Would anything that depends on octave be affected?

My feeling is that version numbers should be incremented for any change that might not be transparent (not counting build time messages that are only for human eyes or logging). Maybe even for changes that don't affect the result, simply to make the fact of the change more visible, unless incrementing the version number otherwise unnecessarily would risk problems of its own.


Note: I don't pretend to understand how all this works or anything about octave in particular, so I may be imagining problems that don't exist, or failing to imagine some that might. But as long as it doesn't interfere with work being done, I tend to think that there's no such thing as too much paranoia. :-)

I dimly recall getting a repair on a Sony Trinitron TV years ago, where the repair shop told me I should prefer the extra wait time and cost to obtain and use an OEM power transistor rather than one of nominally identical specs, because it was used for two different purposes at once (power and sync?) and driven hard, and substitutes wouldn't last long. That's one of those things that unless it's documented, one only would find out by hard experience. So documenting everything earlier may prevent problems later. In software, esp. if any part of building (or a human) might behave differently based on version number, I'd also regard version number as part of that precautionary documentation.

> On Feb 4, 2024, at 12:43, Marius Schamschula <lists at schamschula.com> wroten:
> 
> Given the recent Octave package repository move from SourceForge to GitHub [1], I have updated the octave PortGroup to be able to handle the four repositories that are currently in use:c
> Bitbucket, GitHub, GitLab and SourceForge.
> 
> However, this means that the old octave 1.0 setup is incompatible with the current version. I.e.
> 
> Old: octave.setup package version
> 
> New: octave.setup repo author package version [tag_prefix] [tag_suffix]
> 
> This generally would be an issue, but as I’m currently the only one maintaining the packages, I could switch all Portfiles to use the new syntax all at once.
> 
> Or should I change the octave PortGroup to version 1.1?
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> [1] https://trac.macports.org/ticket/69210 <https://trac.macports.org/ticket/69210>
> Marius
> --
> Marius Schamschula
> 
> 
> 
> 

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