[Pkg-bazaar-maint] Bzr plugins versioning

[Jelmer Vernooij]

On Fri, Oct 09, 2009 at 12:13:26PM +1100, John Ferlito wrote:
> I'd like to start a discussion on the Depends versioning for all the
> plugins. Apologies of this has happened already.
> 
> Currently we seem to have a mix of how we do depends. Some packages eg
> bzr-gtk look like
> 
> Depends: bzr (>= 1.12~), bzr (<< 1.19~)
> 
> and other like bzr-git look like
> 
> Depends: bzr (>= 1.14)
> 
> I'd like to move everything to the latter. Even bzrtools and bzr-svn.
> 
> My reasoning is as follows.
> 
> * We are playing a guessing game as to the next version of bzr.
> * bzr is updated much more regularly than most plugins and with the
>   former method it prevents packages from moving to testing
> * Must plugins don't require this sort of strict versioning
> * When a package does break we can simply upload the newest version to
>   fix it
> * For the packages where it really matters like bzrtools bzr-svn. They
>   are basically running in lockstep with bzr anyway and always get
>   uploaded within days of each other

+1 for bzrtools, which only uses relatively public interfaces.

I don't think this is a good idea for bzr-svn, bzr-git and bzr-hg. We have had 
consistent breakage of bzr-svn because of changes in the Bazaar API, and that 
was the original reason these strict dependencies were added. There will 
always be new upstream releases of these plugins anyway when the bzr API 
version changes.

Cheers,

Jelmer