[Pkg-javascript-devel] Bug#940708: acorn: please revisit your versioning strategy before making a sid upload

[Jonathan Dowland]

Source: acorn
Version: acorn
Severity: normal

The versioning strategy that you are using for the package, and
currently only reflected in experimental, results in versions like the
following

    6.2.1+ds+~0.4.0+~4.0.0+really4.0.0+~1.0.0+~5.0.1+ds+~1.7.0+ds+~0.1.1+~0.3.1+~0.2.0+~0.1.0+~0.3.0+~0.3.0-5

I guess each version component corresponds to one of the bundled
libraries. Which is which, is not clear from the version string alone.
Perhaps it corresponds perfectly to the order of the bundled packages
in debian/control "provides". Perhaps it does not?

Please reconsider your approach to the version string. This is not a
useful scheme. No good can come from this. The super-long version string
*will*, however, cause pain and problems for other Debian developers. It
causes the display of package and versions in tabular form difficult or
broken. It makes it impossible to reliably remember or re-type the
version from memory. It's not useful from a dependency point-of-view,
because a dependent package cannot specify a dependency on only the
component they care about, so they would have to include the versions of
the packages they don't care about too. That makes it no more useful
than an invented single version triplet just for your bundle.

Continuing to use this scheme will make people's lives harder. It's
anti-social.

Please do not upload any package with the current version scheme to
sid.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 10.0
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (990, 'stable'), (500, 'stable-debug'), (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 4.19.0-5-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Kernel taint flags: TAINT_WARN, TAINT_OOT_MODULE, TAINT_UNSIGNED_MODULE
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

-- 
Jonathan Dowland